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<\/a><\/p>\nNew Histories of the Andaman Islands: a research collaboration<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The genesis of our project was a collective realisation that our disciplinary and subject trenches did not enable us to answer questions that are pressing in the Islands today. These are to do with land, in particular, and the relationship between the Islands and the Indian mainland. The eventual outcome of an intensive 3 \u00bd years of research was the book, New Histories of the Andaman Islands: landscape place and identity in the Bay of Bengal<\/em><\/a> (Cambridge University Press, 2016). It turns on a framework attentive to space, landscape and visuality. We took a multi-disciplinary approach, bringing together our work – in public and private archives, on memorials and photographs, and through interviews, ethnographic observation and (for Vishvajit) anthropological research \u2013 to bear on a set of collective questions. These included: What are the historic roots and land allocation? How were the Islands \u2018developed\u2019 in the twentieth century? What does the history of the Islands as a penal colony mean for Islanders\u2019 understandings of their place in the history of Empire and nation? In what ways does the Islands\u2019 Second World War occupation by the Japanese manifest itself in contemporary identity claims? How do Indigenous people imagine the spatiality of the forests that they inhabit? In what ways do the Indian nation state and Islanders perceive and use built structures of commemoration? And, importantly, what are the historical and contemporary specificities of the Andamans as islands<\/em>?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I open with a discussion of this recently completed project, because it has completely changed the way that I do research. I can no longer think solely<\/em> of working alone; of collecting, interpreting and writing by myself. Of course, I often work in solitary fashion in archives, and I single author, present and publish research papers and lectures. But, I am now part of a team collaborating on a larger historical project, and I can no longer imagine working in any other way. As followers of this blog will know, the Carceral Archipelago is attempting to write the first global history of convicts and penal colonies since 1415. No single<\/em> historian has the historiographical\/ disciplinary\/ area studies background understanding, the scholarly networks, or the knowledge of archives and languages necessary to write even a tiny part of this \u2018global history\u2019. Only<\/em> a group of scholars can work on a set of questions that cuts across geographies and sources. And, only<\/em> a team has the capacity to get through an enormous amount of reading and archival material necessary for such an endeavour.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Empire ‘Everywhere and All At Once’ – the Snapshots project<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And so I come to our \u2018sister project\u2019, Snapshots of Empire<\/a>, and the hugely enjoyable workshop that myself and Carceral Archipelago project team members Kellie Moss and Katherine Roscoe attended recently at the University of Sussex. Snapshots of Empire is another team based project. Directed by Alan Lester, who is working with postdoctoral researchers Kate Boehme and Pete Mitchell, Snapshots is trying to transform the way that we understand history, and do our research, by working across three established distinctions in studies of Empire: between governance and governmentality; between imperial and new imperial history; and between Colonial Office and India Office archives. The difference between each of them might be summarised as follows: governance equates to government and administration, governmentality (in Foucault\u2019s sense) to the management and control of people and populations at large. Imperial history tends to focus on administration, economics, business and trade; and new imperial history foregrounds subaltern studies, gender and race. Colonial Office records, the UK side of the archival record of British colonies, dominions and dependencies, are held at The National Archives in Kew. India Office records, the UK archive of the British Indian Empire in South and Southeast Asia, are kept in the Asian and African Studies reading room, on the top floor of the British Library.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Dan Clayton and Catherine Hall respond to the Snapshots’\u00a0team’s\u00a0papers. Photo: Katherine Roscoe<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n As its name suggests, Snapshots is engaging with these issues via the taking of slices of imperial history \u2013 across the whole Empire including India \u2013 in 1838, 1857 and 1879. Theoretically, it seeks to work out the meanings for Empire of the implications of a series of nineteenth-century structures and concerns: simultaneity (the management of multiple systems all at once); agglomeration (the co-location of the Colonial Office and India Office, in London); triage (the balancing and handling of trivial and important matters); heterogeneity (appreciating the diversity of imperial governance); the more-than-human (steamships, technology etc.); and inter-imperialism (British imperial relations with other global powers).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At the workshop, the research team presented material from its findings so far. This included how British officials in the Colonial Office balanced their personal beliefs and views on Indian indentured labour and enslavement with plantation labour demands. Also, an articulation of how planning for the system of assignment for Liberated Africans (illegally traded slaves, captured and \u2018liberated\u2019 in apprenticeship by the British) in Sierra Leone drew on practices of convict assignment in Australian penal colonies. We heard too about Irish sympathies to Indian rebels during the 1857 Uprising, and how on other occasions resources were directed and manipulated, sometimes to the colonies\u2019 advantage. Dan Clayton, John Darwin and myself, in our response to the papers, raised further issues about the importance of the Snapshots project with respect to trust, scale, trivial exclusion, \u2018the official mind\u2019, Indigenous expropriation, and the impact of Empire \u2018at home\u2019. Catherine Hall, director of the Legacies of British Slave Ownership<\/a> project, noted the numerous\u00a0collaborative projects that are currently underway, but reminded us all that team-based history is not necessarily or by its nature exhaustive. She\u00a0cautioned us against straying from the\u00a0original aims and intentions of our respective projects.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n