Contenu du sommaire : Ordre colonial

Theft, Murder and Police Action in Javanese Villages. The Local Dynamics of Security in the Dutch East Indies in the 1930s. Starting from the detailed stuy of a series of armed attacks (rampok) in the city of Madiun in 1934, the article examines the police dynamics at work at the local level in the Dutch East Indies. The failure of the police to prevent robberies in Madiun had a great deal to do with fragmentary police systems. The solution ultimately chosen by the colonial state – mass arrests and imprisonment – was a question preserving prestige : that of the state as well as of the Javanese elite.

“Connaître papier”. Police Work and the Late Colonial State in Togo
In recent historiography on how colonial order was maintained, there are two opposing positions. On one side, the colonial state is defined by the specificity of the categories it uses to classify individuals. On the other side, it is characterised by the proportion of its agents that do not comply with formal standards. This article proposes a third research approach : how the late colonial state, by accumulating bureaucratic standards leading to new skills within police trades, was able to affect the destiny of its agents, regardless of how many of them individuals complied with those standards on a day-to-day basis.

Supervising Sexuality in Colonial Vietnam : Vice Squad and Regulation of Prostitution from the 1870s to the End of the 1930s. Colonisation is first of all an encounter and as such helps to blur the racial boundary lines that underlie the colonial order. Maintaining order and regulating prostitution therefore mean drawing new racial boundary lines and introducing systems of population separation and coexistence in every domain, even the most private. The vice squad, a tool for managing contacts between populations and races, thus participates in the broader project of maintaining the colonial order.

The Impossible Control of a Colonial City ?
This article focuses on the violent repression of nationalist demonstrations in Casablanca in December 1952, analysing how, in a context of rapid social and urban change, the colonial authorities attempted to curb the proliferation of political resistance. It shows that, despite the use of unlimited lethal violence and judicial repression, the colonial authorities were unable to re-establish the colonial order in the face of the plurality of the nationalist repertory that defied the urban segregation it was supposed to contain.

The Constitution of a Nationalist Deviation in the Soviet Union of the 1920s : the Tatars of Crimea and the veli-ibraïmovchtchina. A Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea was proclaimed in the autumn of 1921 and soon tensions appeared between various actors over the orientation of national policy. This article examines the conflicts that developed within the Crimean Communist Party and how they helped to change the political and social order in the peninsula. It shows how the disputes that opposed individuals were initially defined, then redefined and criminalised, and gave rise to one of the political trials during the spring of 1928 in the Soviet Union.

The Cross of Dias
Since Bartolomeu Dias first planted a monument in 1488 to mark the successful circumnavigation of Africa, the Kwaaihoek Dune, standing on a South African beach, has remained the focal point of converging itineraries and gazes. The Cross of Dias, a monument that was initially lost and then reconstructed, has served many purposes : at first the bitter destiny of navigators and in the end the incarnation of the memory of the country's whites. But what an archaeology of textual as well as material sources reveals is its role as a signpost testifying to a line dividing the landscape and settlement, commemorating what history ultimately turned it into : a border.