At a surprisingly late stage in the debate, anthropological historians drew attention to the fact that colonialism was not a homogeneous process, and that particular colonizing projects were, moreover, frequently internally divided and contested (Stoler in Dirks 1992). That is, while the emphasis had previously been upon the colonized, anthropologists began to differentiate among agents of colonialism such as *missionaries, traders, and the *state. They drew attention not only to predictable conflicts of interest between such groups (that had long been described if not theorized by historians) but also to deeper contradictions within colonizing efforts, for example around tensions between segregration and assimilation, or between metropolitan imperial and †creole settler interests.
Colonializing societies—that were obviously always divided between metropolitan bases and temporary or long-term settler and trader projections—came to be seen as socially and culturally complex entities, to the same degree as the societies that were experiencing and responding to colonization. A shift of anthropological interest from indigenous peoples to colonizers complemented a move on the part of historians away from archive-based histories of Europeans toward oral histories of the colonized, and in many cases individual scholars worked in both fields. Greater sophistication in historical anthropology thus led to a deeper understanding, not of ‘both sides’ of colonial processes, but of the fact that there was a plethora of cross-cutting interests and differences among both colonizing and indigenous populations.
Feminist critique further differentiated colonial projects by suggesting the divergent interests of colonizing men and women, by exploring the particular roles of women missionaries and missionary wives, for example, and by examining the differentiated impact of colonial policies on women and men. These were often considerable, given the degree to which, at various times, missions, government policies, and labour recruiting practices explicitly aimed to transform the division of labour and domestic relations (see e.g. Jolly and Macintyre 1989). *Gender has long been significant in colonial and indigenous imaginings of cross-cultural relationships—the feminization of the Oriental other has become a truism of critical discourse—but more can be done on the workings of notions of domesticity, familial forms, and the mutation of indigenous gender identities under colonization.
Parallels have been identified between administrative and evangelical efforts both within metropolitan countries and on the periphery (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991), such as the efforts that were widely projected and implemented from the late nineteenth century onward to sanitize and regulate societies, efforts that entailed much ethnographic, statistical and photographic documentation, and complex interpretive efforts as well as struggles to implement new divisions of space upon recalcitrant English slum-dwellers and African villagers. In this case, ‘colonialism’ might threaten to evaporate altogether as a category of analysis, to be displaced by modernizing social transformations that were implemented both abroad and at home (and in some cases by national élites in the absence of actual colonial rule; in Thailand and Japan, for example). While these closely-linked projects need to be analysed further, the centrality of *race in colonial imaginings and practices suggests that colonial relationships still need to be considered distinctively, however remarkably diversified they have been and are; and the continuing significance of racism and race makes the study of colonial histories—that are the antecedents to the contemporary global order—a priority for the discipline.
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