Journal articles on the topic 'East India Company; Colonies; Administration'

The end of the eighteenth century, the English East India Company dominated most of the part of the Indian peninsula. In a way, it was also considered as the revolutionary transition of the Indian society through the westernization. At the same time, some historians point out that, it was the period of anarchy as well as the dark age of the Indian history. The English East India Company controlled the trade between India and Europe, and finally they acquired the administrative power over India. In the context of Malabar, the English East India Company took the administration in 1792, and emerged as a kind of superlord through the domination over the indigenous rulers. The advent of the Company rule in Malabar replaced the traditional customs and introduced structural changes in the society and economy. This study emphasis on the people’s attitude towards the Company administration in Malabar and how they incorporated to the ‘new administration’. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijssm.v1i4.11180 Int. J. Soc. Sci. Manage. Vol-1, issue-4: 160-163

By writing about the late eighteenth-century revolution which led to the East India Company rule, members of a largely Muslim pre-colonial administrative elite in eastern India sought take control over their own history. They explained the society and ancien régime of India, as well as themselves, to the new British rulers for whom they worked. In so doing, they strove to inform and guide the new British colonial authorities into employing them in the new administration as well as into valuing the cultural mores and bureaucratic experience which they embodied. They also wrote introspectively for the own class, trying to understand the causes of the revolution that had displaced their own traditional rulers and themselves with rule by Europeans and administrations staffed increasingly by Indians with backgrounds different from their own.

AbstractThis paper argues that our understanding of the transition to colonialism in South Asia can be enriched by examining the formation of revenue collection systems in north India between 1750 and 1850. It examines agrarian revenue systems not through the prism of legalism or landholding patterns, but by looking at the paper and record-based mechanisms by which wealth was actually extracted from India's hinterlands. It also examines the Kayastha pensmen who became an exponentially significant component of an Indo-Muslim revenue administration. They assisted the extension of Mughal revenue collection capabilities as qanungos (registrars) and patwaris (accountants). The intensity of revenue assessment, extraction and collection had increased by the mid 1700s, through the extension of cultivation and assessment by regional Indian kingdoms. The East India Company, in its agrarian revenue settlements in north India, utilized this extant revenue culture to push through savage revenue demands. These Kayastha pensmen thus furnished the ‘young’ Company with the crucial skills, physical records, and legitimacy to garner the agrarian wealth which would fund Britain's Indian empire. These more regular patterns of paper-oriented administration engendered a process of ‘bureaucratization’ and the emergence of the modern colonial state.

The contemporary Islamic resurgence and spirit of pan-lslamism thatare being experienced today throughout the world did not come aboutovernight. They are the results of two counterforces operative in any giveperiod of time. On the one hand, there was the deconstructionist force, inthe form of the colonial and imperial forces that sought to destroy theIslamic value system. On the other hand, there was the reconstructionistforce of 'ulama haqq and the Sufi shaykhs, who served as the prime stiinulatorsof the reform impusle and of change in the religiopolitical outlookof Muslims throughout the world.Islam in South AfricaSouth Africa has played a forceful role in maintaining Islam's dynamicposition for about three centuries. The picturesque activities of the earlierulama (in the broadest sense of the word)-particularly the Sufi shaykhs- andearly imams laid the foundations for the contemporary Islamic resurgencein South Africa, as seen in the Musliin Youth Movement and suchother da'wah movements as the Call of Islam. Past workers and presentmovements have been religiopolitical positivists and activists. From theoutset, Muslims needed to reconstruct Islamic education and maintain themomentum of revivalism and resurgence activities.The Dutch East India Company and English East IndiaCompany: A Deconstructionist ForceThe East India Company refers to any of a number of commercialenterprises formed in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies to further trade with the East Indies. These companies weregiven charters by their respective governments to acquire territory whereverthey could and to exercise therein various governmental functions,including legislation, the issuance of currency, the negotiation of treaties,the waging of war, and the administration of justice ...

The main problem with the orthodox account of modern world politics is that it describes only one of these patterns of international order: the one that was dedicated to the pursuit of peaceful coexistence between equal and mutually independent sovereigns, which developed within the Westphalian system and the European society of states....Orthodox theorists have paid far too little attention to the other pattern of international order, which evolved during roughly the same period of time, but beyond rather than within Europe; not through relations between Europeans, but through relations between Europeans and non-Europeans. Instead of being based on a states-system, this pattern of order was based on colonial and imperial systems, and its characteristic practice was not the reciprocal recognition of sovereign independence between states, but rather the division of sovereignty across territorial borders and the enforcement of individuals' rights to their persons and property. The American Revolution and the “revolution” in Bengal posed new political questions for domestic British politics and inaugurated a new era for the British empire. As the British committed themselves to the administration of a vast population of non-Europeans in the Indian province of Bengal, and estimations of financial windfalls were presented to stockholders and politicians, the center of the British Empire came slowly to shift toward the East. The evolution of a system of indirect rule in India as it related to larger political questions being posed in Britain, partly because of its protracted and diverse nature, has not received the same attention. Attention to Indian states, in the scholarship on eighteenth century South Asia, has closely followed the expanding colonial frontier, focusing on those states that most engaged British military attention: Bengal, Mysore, and the Marathas. And yet, the eighteenth century should also command our attention as a crucial moment of transition from an earlier Indian Ocean world trading system, in which European powers inserted themselves as one sovereign authority among many, to that of being supreme political authorities of territories that they did not govern directly. India's native states, or “country powers,” as the British referred to them in the eighteenth century, underwrote the expansion of the East India Company in the East. The tribute paid by these states became an important financial resource at the company's disposal, as it attempted to balance its books in the late eighteenth century. Additionally, the troops maintained to protect these states were significant in Britain's late eighteenth century military calculations. These states, in other words, were absolutely central to the forging of the British imperial order, and generative of the very practices that came to characterize colonial expansion and governance.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY'SVanity Fair(1847–48) makes a passing reference to a seemingly insignificant trope, the “Black Hole of Calcutta.” Part of an eighteenth-century legacy of unofficial rule in India by the East India Trading Company, this reference to a prison incident in June 1756 rehashes the event that occurred there – nearly one hundred years before the novel was published. The name, the “Black Hole,” evokes the prison itself: an enormous pit dug deep into the ground “eighteenth feet long by fourteen feet, ten inches wide,” according to social historian Brijen K. Gupta. It was “British” in the sense that East India Company agents stationed on-the-ground in Calcutta controlled this makeshift dungeon, using it to enforce local trade agreements with native authorities. Those who intervened were deemed traitors, the worst offenders of state.

Singapore in the Malay Peninsula was targeted by the British East India Company (EIC) to be the epicentre of their direct rule in Southeast Asia. Seeking new sources of revenue at the end of the 18th century, after attaining domination in India, the Company sought to extend its reach into China, and Malaya was the natural region to do this, extending outposts to Penang and Singapore. The latter was first identified as a key site by Stamford Raffles. The EIC Governor General Marquess Hastings (r. 1813-1823) planned to facilitate Raffle’s attention on the Malay Peninsula from Sumatra. Raffles’ plan for Singapore was approved by the EIC’s Bengal Government. The modern system of administration came into the Straits Settlements under the EIC’s Bengal Presidency. In 1819 in Singapore, Raffles established an Anglo-Oriental College (AOC) for the study of Eastern languages, literature, history, and science. The AOC was intended firstly to be the centre of local research and secondly to increase inter-cultural knowledge of the East and West. Besides Raffles’ efforts, the EIC developed political and socio-economic systems for Singapore. The most important aspects of the social development of Singapore were proper accommodation for migrants, poverty eradication, health care, a new system of education, and women’s rights. The free trade introduced by Francis Light (and later Stamford Raffles) in Penang and Singapore respectively gave enormous opportunities for approved merchants to expand their commerce from Burma to Australia and from Java to China. Before the termination of the China trade in 1833 Singapore developed tremendously, and cemented the role of the European trading paradigm in the East.

It is often claimed that Adam Smith and Edmund Burke held similar views on matters relating to political economy. One area of tension in their thought, however, was the institutional credibility of Britain’s East India Company. They both argued that the Company corrupted market order in India, but while Smith supported the termination of the firm’s charter, Burke aspired to preserve it. This article examines why they arrived at such divergent conclusions. It argues that the source of Burke and Smith’s friction arose from the dissimilar frames of reference through which they assessed the credibility of the Company. Burke examined the corporation’s legitimacy through the lens of British prescriptive, imperial, and constitutional history, yet Smith evaluated it as part of his larger attack on the mercantile system. These different frames of reference were responsible for the further incongruities in their thought on the Company relating to the role of prescription and imperial honor in political communities, the qualifications of traders to rule, and the appropriate tempo of policy reform. This article concludes that, even with such differences, the two thinkers’ respective criticisms of the Company illustrate the threat that monopolies pose to the liberal order.

AbstractThe East India Company troops fighting the Burmese aggression on the frontier of Bengal in Eastern India “freed” upper and lower Assam territories in 1825. David Scott of the Bengal Service was appointed to oversee the establishment of civil and revenue administration in these frontier territories. He established a hierarchical multiple structure of “native courts”—called panchayats—as the chief medium of civil and criminal justice. This was ostensibly continuing a traditional Assamese form of dispute resolution—the mel; however, the British criminal jury as well as the expert assessor model animated the system. After his death in 1831, the system was brought in line with the rest of the Bengal administration based on the British court system. His experiment, paralleled in many other newly conquered and ceded districts from the Madras territories to Central India, suggests the use of this mode in post-conquest situations by British administrators in South Asia.

This article proposes a new literary history of British Asia that examines its earliest communities and cultural institutions in translocal and regional registers. Combining translocalism and regionalism redefines Anglo‐Indian writing as constituted by multisited forces, only one of which is the reciprocal exchange between Britain and its colonies that has been the prevailing emphasis of literary criticism about empire. I focus on the eighteenth century's overlooked military men and lowlevel colonial administrators who wrote newspaper verse, travel poetry, and plays. I place their compositions in an institutional chronicle defined by the “cultural company‐state,” the British East India Company, which patronized and censored Anglo- India's multilingual reading publics. In the process of arguing for Anglo‐Indian literature as a local and regional creation, I consider the how the terms British and anglophone should function in literary studies of colonialism organized not by hybridity or creolization but by geographic relations of distinction. (JM)

AbstractThis article will argue that the history of East India Company Bombay – like that of many foreign British enterprises, and like many other ‘global’ cities and indeed colonies generally – is best understood as the product of contradictions and contingencies. Bombay was never easy to define geographically and its identity as an ‘English’ settlement was precarious. It could not insulate itself militarily from the powerful polities nearby; nor could it always rely on the loyalty of its subjects, whether English or of other ethnicities. It was a city constructed out of crisis and tragedy, trial and error, a history that the story about a European dynastic ‘dowry’ obscures, and which Company representatives worked hard to conceal.

This article examines informal (private and commercial) imperial networks and environmental modification by former English East India Company (EIC) employees in New Zealand, as well as the introduction of subcontinental species into that colony. Several very wealthy settlers from India, it argues, single-handedly introduced a cornucopia of Indian plants and animals into different parts of nineteenth-century New Zealand and used money earned in India to engage in large-scale environmental modification. Such was the scale of their enterprise 'in the business of shifting biota from place to place' and in remaking environments in parts of New Zealand that these individuals can be considered 'biota barons'. A focus on the informal eco-cultural networks they created helps refine the thesis of ecological imperialism. It also expands the more recent concept of neo-ecological imperialism, by highlighting the role of non-European natures and models in the re-making of Britain's colonies of settlement and by tracing exchanges between white settler colonies and colonies of extraction. In sum, the paper demonstrates the influence of particular private individuals with the necessary wealth and will to effect certain kinds of environmental change, and tentatively suggests that we might usefully consider Australasia as 'neo-Eurasias' rather than 'neo-Europes'.

Abstract This article examines the role of gift exchanges in political relations between the East India Company and the Mughal imperial administration. Focusing on the period 1670–1720, it discusses the items selected for presentation, the occasions at which they changed hands, and the hierarchical relationships expressed and acknowledged through these transactions. It argues that in exchanges both with the central court and with provincial authorities, transfers of valuables in cash and kind between English and Indian actors were embedded in a wider imperial discourse regarding sovereignty and service. By acknowledging the continuum running from courtly engagements to everyday political interactions at local sites of power, a notion of Company diplomacy comes into view that straddled the boundaries between inter-polity relations and intra-imperial solicitation. As such, the case study invites us to rethink our notion of diplomacy as it pertained to relations between the English Company and Mughal state.

AbstractThis article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britain's settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British campaigners struggled to reconcile their universal understanding of humanity with their equally strong confidence in the benefits of ‘British civilisation’. Their nebulous and changeable programmes for reform failed to convince Britain's politicians and public that the challenges of free trade could be met by the exclusive use of free labour, or that all imperial subjects possessed equal rights. A fuller appreciation of these campaigns reveals the contradictions and occlusions inherent in mid-nineteenth century humanitarianism, and underscores the importance of a more geographically integrated approach to the history of opposition to Britain's empire.

Compares slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire, specifically between the former trading and territorial domains of the West India Company (WIC), the Americas and West Africa, and of the East India Company (VOC), South East Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and South and East Africa. Author presents the latest quantitative assessments concerning the Dutch transatlantic as well as Indian Ocean World slave trade, placing the volume, direction, and characteristics of the forced migration in a historical context. He describes how overall the Dutch were a second-rate player in Atlantic slavery, though in certain periods more important, with according to recent estimates a total of about 554.300 slaves being transported by the Dutch to the Americas. He indicates that while transatlantic slave trade and slavery received much scholarly attention resulting in detailed knowledge, the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean World by the Dutch is comparatively underresearched. Based on demand-side estimates throughout Dutch colonies of the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere, he deduces that probably close to 500.000 slaves were transported by the Dutch in the Indian Ocean World. In addition, the author points at important differences between the nature and contexts of slavery, as in the VOC domains slavery was mostly of an urban and domestic character, contrary to its production base in the Americas. Slavery further did in the VOC areas not have a rigid racial identification like in WIC areas, with continuing, postslavery effects, and allowed for more flexibility, while unlike the plantation colonies in the Caribbean, as Suriname, not imported slaves but indigenous peoples formed the majority. He also points at relative exceptions, e.g. imported slaves for production use in some VOC territories, as the Banda islands and the Cape colony, and a certain domestic and urban focus of slavery in Curaçao.

AbstractIn the second half of the eighteenth century, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) employed hundreds of Indian sailors in Surat in western India to man its ships plying the Asian waters. TheMoorse zeevarenden(Muslim sailors) performed a variety of tasks on board ships and in the port of Batavia, and made it possible for the Company to carry out its commercial ventures across the Indian Ocean. The relationship between the two, however, was rather complex and even contentious. Based on Dutch sources, this article investigates the political-economic contexts of this relationship, examines the structure and organization of the maritime labour market in Surat, and illuminates the role and significance ofzielverkopers(labour contractors) and of the local administration. The analysis of the social, economic, and familial aspects of the market and labour relations in Surat sheds light on pre-capitalist forms of labour recruitment and the institutional dynamics of the Indian labour market.

This article probes the production of the uplands of Chittagong in the early years of British East India Company (EIC)rule in Bengal and its eastern frontiers. The South Asian debates around the nature of agrarian property relations have largely skipped places like Chittagong uplands, consequently, the uplands appear in academic and popular discussions as an already constituted outside to this agrarian historiography. The history of the uplands then become easily separated and consumed as part of frontier studies. The article seeks to address the constitution of this outside. Narrating a story where the protagonists range from influential Bengali middlemen in EIC retinue, Company officers responsible for Chittagong administration to mobile Arakanese men called ‘Magh zamindars’, brought together in a swirl of forged documents and contending claims to ‘wastelands’, the article glimpses into the complex interlocking between upland and lowland networks of Chittagong. It frames this narrative by unpacking the revenue categories of sair and kapas mahal; the two categories used for Chittagong uplands during this period. Disaggregating them allows one to see how the uplands were created in the image of the commodity cotton: the people who produced it, the way it was exchanged and the violence that marked the process.

An imagined divide existed between the Atlantic and Indian Ocean since the earliest days of European transoceanic discovery. The separation was reflected in the charters granted to England’s major trading companies which limited access for private merchants to eastern markets. The Indian Ocean was covered by the charter held by the East India Company and centered on bilateral luxury trade. The trade and activity in Atlantic, by contrast, quickly focused around colonization, agricultural production and trade. However, certain Atlantic merchants saw the potential of applying methods of economic expansion from the Atlantic, more specifically the early American colonies, to new colonization projects in the Indian Ocean. This article considers one such prominent Atlantic merchant, Maurice Thomson. Though his plans did not reach fruition he left a tangible impact on the eic in his attempts to introduce Atlantic methods to the East- thus underlining the porous frontier that separated them.

With the eighteenth century drawing to a close, Anglo-French hostilities were rapidly escalating in Europe. Besides competing for power on the continent, both the British and the French were concerned with expanding their influence in the East, where the once mighty trading empire of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had been in steady decline for some decades. By the end of 1794, conflicts on the continent were turning firmly in France's favour and in January 1795 French troops invaded the Netherlands, forcing the ruling Prince of Orange to seek refuge in England. Members of the Dutch Patriot movement—the democratically-minded opponents of the Dutch monarchy and the old order in general—were sympathetic towards French revolutionary ideals and welcomed the French presence in their country. Meanwhile, the occupation of the Netherlands was of great concern to the British government, who suspected that the French would waste no time in also taking control of strategically-located Dutch colonies.

Abstract This article explores the political fallout from the 1766 execution of the comte de Lally, who oversaw the failed defense of France's Indian colonies during the Seven Years' War. Accused of treason by administrators of the French East India Company, Lally emerged as a source of controversy in the final decades of the Old Regime. As critics and apologists clashed over the legality of Lally's execution, questions about the nature of his “crime” gave way to a broader debate over the meaning and limits of company sovereignty under France's absolutist state. This conflict remained unresolved into the French Revolution. The Lally affair provides a window into the nebulous relationship that developed between the crown, the company, and the emergent French nation, laying bare the many faces of empire that confronted France during the eighteenth century. Cet article explore les retombées politiques de l'exécution du comte de Lally, l'homme qui commandait les colonies des Indes orientales françaises durant la guerre de Sept Ans. Accusé de trahison par la Compagnie des Indes, Lally représentait une source de controverse à la fin de l'Ancien Régime. Tandis que les critiques et les apologistes contestaient la légalité de son exécution, la question de la culpabilité de Lally incita un débat plus général sur la nature de la souveraineté de la Compagnie sous l'Etat absolutiste. Ce débat restait non résolu durant la Révolution française. L'affaire Lally souligne les liens nébuleux parmi la Compagnie, la monarchie, et la nation française. Elle révèle également les multiples incarnations de l'Empire français au cours du dix-huitième siècle.

Il saggio si propone di ricostruire l'azione politica di Thomas Saunders, funzionario della East India Company e governatore di Madras durante un periodo di cruciale importanza per le sorti della presenza britannica in India. Secondo l'autore, Saunders, generalmente sottovalutato dagli storici, fu in realtÀ un personaggio chiave nella guerra del Carnatico, in grado di opporsi con tenacia e prontezza ai progetti egemonici francesi, di cui colse la pericolositÀ. Privo di un ben strutturato piano di conquista e ancora per molti versi legato alla mentalitÀ di agente commerciale, Saunders puň essere considerato una figura di transizione tra il colonialismo mercantile e il colonialismo informale: ritenendo la strategia di supremazia da lui adottata dettata unicamente dalla contingenza del conflitto anglo-franco-indiano e pertanto da abbandonare alla fine delle ostilitÀ, il governatore di Madras non seppe spingersi laddove giunse Robert Clive, il noto conquistatore del Bengala.

Abstract The role of the roughly 600 Indian princely kingdoms in the transformation of the law of nations into international law during the 19th century is an overlooked episode of international legal history. The Indian princely states effected a gradual end of the Mughal and the Maratha confederacies while appropriating international legal language. The Privy Council—before and after 1858—sanctified within common law as the acts of state, both, the seizure of territories from Indian kings and the ossification of encumbrances attached to the annexed territories. After the Crown takeover of the East India Company in 1858, the British India Government carefully rebooted, even mimicked, the native polyandric relationship of the tribal chiefs, petty states and semi-sovereigns with the Mughal–Maratha complex using multi-normative legal texts. Put down in the British stationery as engagements, sunnuds and treaties, these colonial texts projected an imperially layered nature of the native sovereignty. I challenge the metropole's claims of a one-way export to the colonies of the assumed normative surpluses. I argue that the periphery while responding to a ‘jurisdictional imperialism' upended interational law's civilisation-giving thesis by exporting law to the metropole.

ABSTRACTThis address explores the writing of history in Britain during the Georgian and Victorian eras, arguing for the need both to trace British historiographical genealogies along routes that extend from Europe to the Indian subcontinent and to acknowledge the importance of material histories for this evolution. Focusing on military men who served in the East India Company during the Third Anglo-Maratha and Pindari War (1817–18), it examines the entangled histories of material loot, booty and prize on the one hand, and archival and history-writing practices developed by British military officers on the other. Active in these military campaigns and in post-conflict administration of conquered territories, a cadre of Company officers (assisted by ‘native’ interlocutors trained in Indian historical traditions) elaborated historical practices that we more conventionally associate with the Rankean historiographical innovations of the Victorian era. The Royal Historical Society's own history is shaped by these cross-cultural material encounters.

AbstractAs a civil servant in the East India Company and witness to government expansion and reorganization in the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill developed an interest in civil service reform. In an essay supporting the 1854 Northcote-Trevelyan Report and his later political treatises, Mill argued for competitive civil service recruitment. These writings have been relatively neglected by Mill scholars, but I posit that they elucidate a contested aspect of his theory. Mill advocated democracy and expert bureaucracy and, although researchers see tension between these systems, I argue that Mill saw them as compatible. Consequently, Mill's theory might be more consistent and complete than many believe, and the public administration debate should perhaps no longer be seen in terms of an opposition between expertise and democracy.

One of the many problems facing the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was the future of the conquered German and Turkish territories in Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Widespread anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and the United States opposed direct annexation of the possessions, but wartime agreements and the security interests of the Allies prevented returning the conquered areas to their former rulers. In particular, many British leaders wanted to ensure that Germany could never again attempt world domination and were convinced that the restoration to Germany of its overseas possessions would pose a “grave political and military menace” to Britain's vital maritime connections with South Africa and India. After a long, often acrimonious debate, the Conference agreed on a compromise that placed the former German colonies and Ottoman provinces under the supervision of the League of Nations. This solution gave the Allies control of their acquisitions as “mandates” within a framework of international accountability. Great Britain received the most mandates, including Germany's largest colony of German East Africa. For the British leaders who had always advocated transforming German East Africa into a British colony, the new system seemed to make little practical difference. For the colonial officials in London and at the highest levels of colonial administration within the conquered possession, however, the mandates system presented serious problems and was not simply a disguise for annexation.

The paper investigates the principal architectural considerations that governed the evolution of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, the three British colonial port cities of India, and seeks to answer the question of whether and to what extent these cities were planned. The extreme view in this debate on planning is taken by Sten Nilsson in his European Architecture in India, where he claims that the cities were based on strict symmetrical grid planning and were inspired by the Renaissance urban ideal, unlike traditional "organic" Indian cities. The paper questions this in view of the clear evidence that the British East India Company, unlike the French, was hostile to any ambitious urban planning on the part of the settlements. The hypothesis is further strengthened when one analyzes the ground plans of these cities, which show that defense considerations discouraged any symmetrical central planning, even though the streets were laid out in straight lines. In the absence of a central planning code, like the Royal Ordinance of 1573 for Spanish colonies, the building projects proceeded from the growing urban requirements of these settlements. The projects themselves were modest and defense naturally dominated building activities, mainly because these tiny enclaves were surrounded by hostile local and European powers. The growing needs of the inhabitants could not be neglected, however, and churches and hospitals came next in order of priority. The governors' mansions, on the other hand, had a position of peculiar importance in these port cities as they were meant to be a clear and visible symbol of authority. Not least interesting in these conurbations was the confluence of two traditions, Western and Eastern, though it must be added that the predominant style tended to be European, and mostly contemporary Tuscan. The conclusion reached is that while there was hardly any grandiose, symmetrical, total planning in these port cities, the city fathers did not neglect to make them habitable and even pleasant by developing gardens and parks in them.

AbstractThis article examines how the East India Company's 1856 annexation of the Indian Kingdom of Awadh informed British Conservative responses to the Indian Revolt in 1857 and 1858. Addressing scholarship on Britain's reaction to the revolt and political engagement with Indian empire, this study reveals that Conservatives interpreted this event with a veneration for locality and prescription. Criticism from company officials and Awadh's deposed royal family informed Conservative perceptions that British exploitation and westernization were responsible for military rebellion and popular upheaval. Principally, this reflected Conservative skepticism regarding liberal modernity as well as support for prescribed aristocratic, propertied, and established church interests in Britain. Their response, expressed in Parliament and supported in conservative periodicals, was the 1858 Queen's Proclamation authored by Edward Smith-Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby's Conservative government. The proclamation established a lasting imperial framework which defined the crown's obligation to uphold India's political, social, and cultural differences and separation from Britain. Future Conservatives strengthened British views of India's distinctiveness by supporting perceived traditional leaders and customs over uniform western administration and education.

The pressing preoccupation of the British administration in the early decades of the nineteenth century to clip the wings of the malicious Indian shroffs (Bankers) and their manoeuvres and secret dealings was in sharp and in a sense valid contrast to their earlierperceptions of the Indian shroffs and their Hundi empire. By 1807, Mr Rickards, senior member of the Bombay establishment, was urging the Governor-General in Council to establisha General Bank whose operations would extend throughout India, facilitate remittances andcredit transfers from one part of the country to another, and above all ‘free the mercantile body from losses and inconveniences suffered in the exchange and from the artifices of shroffs’. Their ‘undue and pernicious influence over the course of trade and exchange’ could no longer be treated with forbearance, and the urgency of remedy was stressed. It was both strange and ironical that such advice should stem from a quarter where in the crucial years of political change and transition in the second half of the eighteenth century, the cooperation and intervention of the indigenous banking fraternity and their credit support had proved vital to the success of the Imperial strategy. The experience was admittedly not unique to Bombay and the English East India Company (hence-forth E.E.I.C) and in a sense the guarantee of local credit and the support of service groups for a variety of reasons, was clearly envisagedas a basic ingredient to state building in the eighteenth century.

I believe that no country ever stood so much in need of a code of laws as India; and I believe also that there never was a country in which the want might so easily be supplied. I said that there were many points of analogy between the state of that country after the fall of the Mogul power, and the state of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire. In one respect the analogy is very striking.As there were in Europe then, so there are in India now, several systems of law widely differing from each other, but coexisting and coequal. The indigenous population has its own laws. Each of the successive races of conquerors has brought with it its own peculiar jurisprudence: the Mussulman his Koran and the innumerable commentators on the Koran; the Englishman his Statute Book and his Term Reports. As there were established in Italy, at one and the same time, the Roman Law, the Lombard law, the Ripuarian law, the Bavarian law, and the Salic law, so we have now in our Eastern empire Hindoo law, Mahometan law, Parsee law, English law, perpetually mingling with each other and disturbing each other, varying with the person, varying with the place.–Thomas Babington MacaulayOn July 10 1833, in his lengthy and famous speech on the “Government of India” delivered to the House of Commons, Thomas Babington Macaulay offered a brief but fascinating spatial-temporal assessment of the exigencies confronting British legal reform in India. As his above-cited remarks suggest, Macaulay was well acquainted with the subcontinent's rich landscape of multiple legalities and was particularly attuned to the challenges this legal plurality posed to British rule. At the same time, his observations serve as an astute testament to law's travels. Macaulay's speech addressed a range of politically charged issues, including allegations of scandal and corruption surrounding the East India Company's administration. By the end, however, he turned from justifying and defending Company pursuits to persuading an attentive Parliament about the necessity and merits of legal codification. Given Macaulay's unwavering belief in the superiority of Britain (and Europe)—most clearly articulated in his developmentalist analogy between “Europe then” and “India now”—the most plausible itinerary of law's movements was a unidirectional one: law originated in metropolitan London and moved outward to India and elsewhere. However, in advancing his case for codification, Macaulay inadvertently exposed many other laws and their respective circuits of travel. India was difficult to govern precisely because it was a terrain of legal mobility; the residues of other people, places, and times produced a polyglot existence of “Hindoo law, Mahometan law, Parsee law, English law, perpetually mingling with each other and disturbing each other.” What India needed most, Macaulay urged, was a systematized, standardized, and codified rule of law that was to be introduced and imposed by the British: “A code is almost the only blessing, perhaps it is the only blessing, which absolute governments are better fitted to confer on a nation than popular governments.”

Environments containing significant concentration of NaCl such as salt lakes harbor extremophiles microorganisms which have a great biotechnology interest. To explore the diversity of Bacteria in Chott Tinsilt (Algeria), an isolation program was performed. Water samples were collected from the saltern during the pre-salt harvesting phase. This Chott is high in salt (22.47% (w/v). Seven halophiles Bacteria were selected for further characterization. The isolated strains were able to grow optimally in media with 10–25% (w/v) total salts. Molecular identification of the isolates was performed by sequencing the 16S rRNA gene. It showed that these cultured isolates included members belonging to the Halomonas, Staphylococcus, Salinivibrio, Planococcus and Halobacillus genera with less than 98% of similarity with their closest phylogenetic relative. The halophilic bacterial isolates were also characterized for the production of biosurfactant and industrially important enzymes. Most isolates produced hydrolases and biosurfactants at high salt concentration. In fact, this is the first report on bacterial strains (A4 and B4) which were a good biosurfactant and coagulase producer at 20% and 25% ((w/v)) NaCl. In addition, the biosurfactant produced by the strain B4 at high salinity (25%) was also stable at high temperature (30-100°C) and high alkalinity (pH 11).Key word: Salt Lake, Bacteria, biosurfactant, Chott, halophiles, hydrolases, 16S rRNAINTRODUCTIONSaline lakes cover approximately 10% of the Earth’s surface area. The microbial populations of many hypersaline environments have already been studied in different geographical regions such as Great Salt Lake (USA), Dead Sea (Israel), Wadi Natrun Lake (Egypt), Lake Magadi (Kenya), Soda Lake (Antarctica) and Big Soda Lake and Mono Lake (California). Hypersaline regions differ from each other in terms of geographical location, salt concentration and chemical composition, which determine the nature of inhabitant microorganisms (Gupta et al., 2015). Then low taxonomic diversity is common to all these saline environments (Oren et al., 1993). Halophiles are found in nearly all major microbial clades, including prokaryotic (Bacteria and Archaea) and eukaryotic forms (DasSarma and Arora, 2001). They are classified as slight halophiles when they grow optimally at 0.2–0.85 M (2–5%) NaCl, as moderate halophiles when they grow at 0.85–3.4 M (5–20%) NaCl, and as extreme halophiles when they grow at 3.4–5.1 M (20–30%) NaCl. Hyper saline environments are inhabited by extremely halophilic and halotolerant microorganisms such as Halobacillus sp, Halobacterium sp., Haloarcula sp., Salinibacter ruber , Haloferax sp and Bacillus spp. (Solomon and Viswalingam, 2013). There is a tremendous demand for halophilic bacteria due to their biotechnological importance as sources of halophilic enzymes. Enzymes derived from halophiles are endowed with unique structural features and catalytic power to sustain the metabolic and physiological processes under high salt conditions. Some of these enzymes have been reported to be active and stable under more than one extreme condition (Karan and Khare, 2010). Applications are being considered in a range of industries such as food processing, washing, biosynthetic processes and environmental bioremediation. Halophilic proteases are widely used in the detergent and food industries (DasSarma and Arora, 2001). However, esterases and lipases have also been useful in laundry detergents for the removal of oil stains and are widely used as biocatalysts because of their ability to produce pure compounds. Likewise, amylases are used industrially in the first step of the production of high fructose corn syrup (hydrolysis of corn starch). They are also used in the textile industry in the de-sizing process and added to laundry detergents. Furthermore, for the environmental applications, the use of halophiles for bioremediation and biodegradation of various materials from industrial effluents to soil contaminants and accidental spills are being widely explored. In addition to enzymes, halophilic / halotolerants microorganisms living in saline environments, offer another potential applications in various fields of biotechnology like the production of biosurfactant. Biosurfactants are amphiphilic compounds synthesized from plants and microorganisms. They reduce surface tension and interfacial tension between individual molecules at the surface and interface respectively (Akbari et al., 2018). Comparing to the chemical surfactant, biosurfactant are promising alternative molecules due to their low toxicity, high biodegradability, environmental capability, mild production conditions, lower critical micelle concentration, higher selectivity, availability of resources and ability to function in wide ranges of pH, temperature and salinity (Rocha et al., 1992). They are used in various industries which include pharmaceuticals, petroleum, food, detergents, cosmetics, paints, paper products and water treatment (Akbari et al., 2018). The search for biosurfactants in extremophiles is particularly promising since these biomolecules can adapt and be stable in the harsh environments in which they are to be applied in biotechnology.OBJECTIVESEastern Algeria features numerous ecosystems including hypersaline environments, which are an important source of salt for food. The microbial diversity in Chott Tinsilt, a shallow Salt Lake with more than 200g/L salt concentration and a superficies of 2.154 Ha, has never yet been studied. The purpose of this research was to chemically analyse water samples collected from the Chott, isolate novel extremely or moderate halophilic Bacteria, and examine their phenotypic and phylogenetic characteristics with a view to screening for biosurfactants and enzymes of industrial interest.MATERIALS AND METHODSStudy area: The area is at 5 km of the Commune of Souk-Naâmane and 17 km in the South of the town of Aïn-Melila. This area skirts the trunk road 3 serving Constantine and Batna and the railway Constantine-Biskra. It is part the administrative jurisdiction of the Wilaya of Oum El Bouaghi. The Chott belongs to the wetlands of the High Plains of Constantine with a depth varying rather regularly without never exceeding 0.5 meter. Its length extends on 4 km with a width of 2.5 km (figure 1).Water samples and physico-chemical analysis: In February 2013, water samples were collected from various places at the Chott Tinsilt using Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates of 35°53’14” N lat. and 06°28’44”E long. Samples were collected randomly in sterile polythene bags and transported immediately to the laboratory for isolation of halophilic microorganisms. All samples were treated within 24 h after collection. Temperature, pH and salinity were measured in situ using a multi-parameter probe (Hanna Instruments, Smithfield, RI, USA). The analytical methods used in this study to measure ions concentration (Ca2+, Mg2+, Fe2+, Na+, K+, Cl−, HCO3−, SO42−) were based on 4500-S-2 F standard methods described elsewhere (Association et al., 1920).Isolation of halophilic bacteria from water sample: The media (M1) used in the present study contain (g/L): 2.0 g of KCl, 100.0/200.0 g of NaCl, 1.0 g of MgSO4.7HO2, 3.0 g of Sodium Citrate, 0.36 g of MnCl2, 10.0 g of yeast extract and 15.0 g agar. The pH was adjusted to 8.0. Different dilutions of water samples were added to the above medium and incubated at 30°C during 2–7 days or more depending on growth. Appearance and growth of halophilic bacteria were monitored regularly. The growth was diluted 10 times and plated on complete medium agar (g/L): glucose 10.0; peptone 5.0; yeast extract 5.0; KH2PO4 5.0; agar 30.0; and NaCl 100.0/200.0. Resultant colonies were purified by repeated streaking on complete media agar. The pure cultures were preserved in 20% glycerol vials and stored at −80°C for long-term preservation.Biochemical characterisation of halophilic bacterial isolates: Bacterial isolates were studied for Gram’s reaction, cell morphology and pigmentation. Enzymatic assays (catalase, oxidase, nitrate reductase and urease), and assays for fermentation of lactose and mannitol were done as described by Smibert (1994).Optimization of growth conditions: Temperature, pH, and salt concentration were optimized for the growth of halophilic bacterial isolates. These growth parameters were studied quantitatively by growing the bacterial isolates in M1 medium with shaking at 200 rpm and measuring the cell density at 600 nm after 8 days of incubation. To study the effect of NaCl on the growth, bacterial isolates were inoculated on M1 medium supplemented with different concentration of NaCl: 1%-35% (w/v). The effect of pH on the growth of halophilic bacterial strains was studied by inoculating isolates on above described growth media containing NaCl and adjusted to acidic pH of 5 and 6 by using 1N HCl and alkaline pH of 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 using 5N NaOH. The effect of temperature was studied by culturing the bacterial isolates in M1 medium at different temperatures of incubation (4°C–55°C).Screening of halophilic bacteria for hydrolytic enzymes: Hydrolase producing bacteria among the isolates were screened by plate assay on starch, tributyrin, gelatin and DNA agar plates respectively for amylase, lipase, protease and DNAse activities. Amylolytic activity of the cultures was screened on starch nutrient agar plates containing g/L: starch 10.0; peptone 5.0; yeast extract 3.0; agar 30.0; NaCl 100.0/250.0. The pH was 7.0. After incubation at 30 ºC for 7 days, the zone of clearance was determined by flooding the plates with iodine solution. The potential amylase producers were selected based on ratio of zone of clearance diameter to colony diameter. Lipase activity of the cultures was screened on tributyrin nutrient agar plates containing 1% (v/v) of tributyrin. Isolates that showed clear zones of tributyrin hydrolysis were identified as lipase producing bacteria. Proteolytic activity of the isolates was similarly screened on gelatin nutrient agar plates containing 10.0 g/L of gelatin. The isolates showing zones of gelatin clearance upon treatment with acidic mercuric chloride were selected and designated as protease producing bacteria. The presence of DNAse activity on plates was determined on DNAse test agar (BBL) containing 10%-25% (w/v) total salt. After incubation for 7days, the plates were flooded with 1N HCl solution. Clear halos around the colonies indicated DNAse activity (Jeffries et al., 1957).Milk clotting activity (coagulase activity) of the isolates was also determined following the procedure described (Berridge, 1952). Skim milk powder was reconstituted in 10 mM aqueous CaCl2 (pH 6.5) to a final concentration of 0.12 kg/L. Enzyme extracts were added at a rate of 0.1 mL per mL of milk. The coagulation point was determined by manual rotating of the test tube periodically, at short time intervals, and checking for visible clot formation.Screening of halophilic bacteria for biosurfactant production. Oil spread Assay: The Petridis base was filled with 50 mL of distilled water. On the water surface, 20μL of diesel and 10μl of culture were added respectively. The culture was introduced at different spots on the diesel, which is coated on the water surface. The occurrence of a clear zone was an indicator of positive result (Morikawa et al., 2000). The diameter of the oil expelling circles was measured by slide caliber (with a degree of accuracy of 0.02 mm).Surface tension and emulsification index (E24): Isolates were cultivated at 30 °C for 7 days on the enrichment medium containing 10-25% NaCl and diesel oil as the sole carbon source. The medium was centrifuged (7000 rpm for 20 min) and the surface tension of the cell-free culture broth was measured with a TS90000 surface tensiometer (Nima, Coventry, England) as a qualitative indicator of biosurfactant production. The culture broth was collected with a Pasteur pipette to remove the non-emulsified hydrocarbons. The emulsifying capacity was evaluated by an emulsification index (E24). The E24 of culture samples was determined by adding 2 mL of diesel oil to the same amount of culture, mixed for 2 min with a vortex, and allowed to stand for 24 h. E24 index is defined as the percentage of height of emulsified layer (mm) divided by the total height of the liquid column (mm).Biosurfactant stability studies : After growth on diesel oil as sole source of carbone, cultures supernatant obtained after centrifugation at 6,000 rpm for 15 min were considered as the source of crude biosurfactant. Its stability was determined by subjecting the culture supernatant to various temperature ranges (30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 100 °C) for 30 min then cooled to room temperature. Similarly, the effect of different pH (2–11) on the activity of the biosurfactant was tested. The activity of the biosurfactant was investigated by measuring the emulsification index (El-Sersy, 2012).Molecular identification of potential strains. DNA extraction and PCR amplification of 16S rDNA: Total cellular DNA was extracted from strains and purified as described by Sambrook et al. (1989). DNA was purified using Geneclean® Turbo (Q-BIO gene, Carlsbad, CA, USA) before use as a template in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. For the 16S rDNA gene sequence, the purified DNA was amplified using a universal primer set, forward primer (27f; 5′-AGA GTT TGA TCM TGG CTC AG) and a reverse primer (1492r; 5′-TAC GGY TAC CTT GTT ACG ACT T) (Lane, 1991). Agarose gel electrophoresis confirmed the amplification product as a 1400-bp DNA fragment.16S rDNA sequencing and Phylogenic analysis: Amplicons generated using primer pair 27f-1492r was sequenced using an automatic sequencer system at Macrogene Company (Seoul, Korea). The sequences were compared with those of the NCBI BLAST GenBank nucleotide sequence databases. Phylogenetic trees were constructed by the neighbor-joining method using MEGA version 5.05 software (Tamura et al., 2011). Bootstrap resembling analysis for 1,000 replicates was performed to estimate the confidence of tree topologies.Nucleotide sequence accession numbers: The nucleotide sequences reported in this work have been deposited in the EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database. The accession numbers are represented in table 5.Statistics: All experiments were conducted in triplicates. Results were evaluated for statistical significance using ANOVA.RESULTSPhysico-chemical parameters of the collected water samples: The physicochemical properties of the collected water samples are reported in table 1. At the time of sampling, the temperature was 10.6°C and pH 7.89. The salinity of the sample, as determined in situ, was 224.70 g/L (22,47% (w/v)). Chemical analysis of water sample indicated that Na +and Cl- were the most abundant ions (table 1). SO4-2 and Mg+2 was present in much smaller amounts compared to Na +and Cl- concentration. Low levels of calcium, potassium and bicarbonate were also detected, often at less than 1 g/L.Characterization of isolates. Morphological and biochemical characteristic feature of halophilic bacterial isolates: Among 52 strains isolated from water of Chott Tinsilt, seven distinct bacteria (A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B4 and B5) were chosen for further characterization (table 2). The colour of the isolates varied from beige, pale yellow, yellowish and orange. The bacterial isolates A1, A2, A4, B1 and B5 were rod shaped and gram negative (except B5), whereas A3 and B4 were cocci and gram positive. All strains were oxidase and catalase positive except for B1. Nitrate reductase and urease activities were observed in all the bacterial isolates, except B4. All the bacterial isolates were negative for H2S formation. B5 was the only strain positive for mannitol fermentation (table 2).We isolated halophilic bacteria on growth medium with NaCl supplementation at pH 7 and temperature of 30°C. We studied the effect of NaCl, temperature and pH on the growth of bacterial isolates. All the isolates exhibited growth only in the presence of NaCl indicating that these strains are halophilic. The optimum growth of isolates A3 and B1 was observed in the presence of 10% NaCl, whereas it was 15% NaCl for A1, A2 and B5. A4 and B4 showed optimum growth in the presence of 20% and 25% NaCl respectively. A4, B4 and B5 strains can tolerate up to 35% NaCl.The isolate B1 showed growth in medium supplemented with 10% NaCl and pH range of 7–10. The optimum pH for the growth B1 was 9 and they did not show any detectable growth at or below pH 6 (table 2), which indicates the alkaliphilic nature of B1 isolate. The bacterial isolates A1, A2 and A4 exhibited growth in the range of pH 6–10, while A3 and B4 did not show any growth at pH greater than 8. The optimum pH for growth of all strains (except B1) was pH 7.0 (table 2). These results indicate that A1, A2, A3, A4, B4 and B5 are neutrophilic in nature. All the bacterial isolates exhibited optimal growth at 30°C and no detectable growth at 55°C. Also, detectable growth of isolates A1, A2 and A4 was observed at 4°C. However, none of the bacterial strains could grow below 4°C and above 50°C (table 2).Screening of the halophilic enzymes: To characterize the diversity of halophiles able to produce hydrolytic enzymes among the population of microorganisms inhabiting the hypersaline habitats of East Algeria (Chott Tinsilt), a screening was performed. As described in Materials and Methods, samples were plated on solid media containing 10%-25% (w/v) of total salts and different substrates for the detection of amylase, protease, lipase and DNAse activities. However, coagulase activity was determined in liquid medium using milk as substrate (figure 3). Distributions of hydrolytic activity among the isolates are summarized in table 4.From the seven bacterial isolates, four strains A1, A2, A4 and B5 showed combined hydrolytic activities. They were positive for gelatinase, lipase and coagulase. A3 strain showed gelatinase and lipase activities. DNAse activities were detected with A1, A4, B1 and B5 isolates. B4 presented lipase and coagulase activity. Surprisingly, no amylase activity was detected among all the isolates.Screening for biosurfactant producing isolates: Oil spread assay: The results showed that all the strains could produce notable (>4 cm diameter) oil expelling circles (ranging from 4.11 cm to 4.67 cm). The average diameter for strain B5 was 4.67 cm, significantly (P < 0.05) higher than for the other strains.Surface tension and emulsification index (E24): The assimilation of hydrocarbons as the sole sources of carbon by the isolate strains led to the production of biosurfactants indicated by the emulsification index and the lowering of the surface tension of cell-free supernatant. Based on rapid growth on media containing diesel oil as sole carbon source, the seven isolates were tested for biosurfactant production and emulsification activity. The obtained values of the surface tension measurements as well as the emulsification index (E24) are shown in table 3. The highest reduction of surface tension was achieved with B5 and A3 isolates with values of 25.3 mN m−1 and 28.1 mN m−1 respectively. The emulsifying capacity evaluated by the E24 emulsification index was highest in the culture of isolate B4 (78%), B5 (77%) and A3 (76%) as shown in table 3 and figure 2. These emulsions were stable even after 4 months. The bacteria with emulsification indices higher than 50 % and/or reduction in the surface tension (under 30 mN/m) have been defined as potential biosurfactant producers. Based on surface tension and the E24 index results, isolates B5, B4, A3 and A4 are the best candidates for biosurfactant production. It is important to note that, strains B4 and A4 produce biosurfactant in medium containing respectively 25% and 20% (w/v) NaCl.Stability of biosurfactant activities: The applicability of biosurfactants in several biotechnological fields depends on their stability at different environmental conditions (temperatures, pH and NaCl). For this study, the strain B4 appear very interesting (It can produce biosurfactant at 25 % NaCl) and was choosen for futher analysis for biosurfactant stability. The effects of temperature and pH on the biosurfactant production by the strain B4 are shown in figure 4.biosurfactant in medium containing respectively 25% and 20% (w/v) NaCl.Stability of biosurfactant activities: The applicability of biosurfactants in several biotechnological fields depends on their stability at different environmental conditions (temperatures, pH and NaCl). For this study, the strain B4 appear very interesting (It can produce biosurfactant at 25 % NaCl) and was chosen for further analysis for biosurfactant stability. The effects of temperature and pH on the biosurfactant production by the strain B4 are shown in figure 4. The biosurfactant produced by this strain was shown to be thermostable giving an E-24 Index value greater than 78% (figure 4A). Heating of the biosurfactant to 100 °C caused no significant effect on the biosurfactant performance. Therefore, the surface activity of the crude biosurfactant supernatant remained relatively stable to pH changes between pH 6 and 11. At pH 11, the value of E24 showed almost 76% activity, whereas below pH 6 the activity was decreased up to 40% (figure 4A). The decreases of the emulsification activity by decreasing the pH value from basic to an acidic region; may be due to partial precipitation of the biosurfactant. This result indicated that biosurfactant produced by strain B4 show higher stability at alkaline than in acidic conditions.Molecular identification and phylogenies of potential isolates: To identify halophilic bacterial isolates, the 16S rDNA gene was amplified using gene-specific primers. A PCR product of ≈ 1.3 kb was detected in all the seven isolates. The 16S rDNA amplicons of each bacterial isolate was sequenced on both strands using 27F and 1492R primers. The complete nucleotide sequence of 1336,1374, 1377,1313, 1305,1308 and 1273 bp sequences were obtained from A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B4 and B5 isolates respectively, and subjected to BLAST analysis. The 16S rDNA sequence analysis showed that the isolated strains belong to the genera Halomonas, Staphylococcus, Salinivibrio, Planococcus and Halobacillus as shown in table 5. The halophilic isolates A2 and A4 showed 97% similarity with the Halomonas variabilis strain GSP3 (accession no. AY505527) and the Halomonas sp. M59 (accession no. AM229319), respectively. As for A1, it showed 96% similarity with the Halomonas venusta strain GSP24 (accession no. AY553074). B1 and B4 showed for their part 96% similarity with the Salinivibrio costicola subsp. alcaliphilus strain 18AG DSM4743 (accession no. NR_042255) and the Planococcus citreus (accession no. JX122551), respectively. The bacterial isolate B5 showed 98% sequence similarity with the Halobacillus trueperi (accession no. HG931926), As for A3, it showed only 95% similarity with the Staphylococcus arlettae (accession no. KR047785). The 16S rDNA nucleotide sequences of all the seven halophilic bacterial strains have been submitted to the NCBI GenBank database under the accession number presented in table 5. The phylogenetic association of the isolates is shown in figure 5.DICUSSIONThe physicochemical properties of the collected water samples indicated that this water was relatively neutral (pH 7.89) similar to the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake (USA) and in contrast to the more basic lakes such as Lake Wadi Natrun (Egypt) (pH 11) and El Golea Salt Lake (Algeria) (pH 9). The salinity of the sample was 224.70 g/L (22,47% (w/v). This range of salinity (20-30%) for Chott Tinsilt is comparable to a number of well characterized hypersaline ecosystems including both natural and man-made habitats, such as the Great Salt Lake (USA) and solar salterns of Puerto Rico. Thus, Chott Tinsilt is a hypersaline environment, i.e. environments with salt concentrations well above that of seawater. Chemical analysis of water sample indicated that Na +and Cl- were the most abundant ions, as in most hypersaline ecosystems (with some exceptions such as the Dead Sea). These chemical water characteristics were consistent with the previously reported data in other hypersaline ecosystems (DasSarma and Arora, 2001; Oren, 2002; Hacěne et al., 2004). Among 52 strains isolated from this Chott, seven distinct bacteria (A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B4 and B5) were chosen for phenotypique, genotypique and phylogenetique characterization.The 16S rDNA sequence analysis showed that the isolated strains belong to the genera Halomonas, Staphylococcus, Salinivibrio, Planococcus and Halobacillus. Genera obtained in the present study are commonly occurring in various saline habitats across the globe. Staphylococci have the ability to grow in a wide range of salt concentrations (Graham and Wilkinson, 1992; Morikawa et al., 2009; Roohi et al., 2014). For example, in Pakistan, Staphylococcus strains were isolated from various salt samples during the study conducted by Roohi et al. (2014) and these results agreed with previous reports. Halomonas, halophilic and/or halotolerant Gram-negative bacteria are typically found in saline environments (Kim et al., 2013). The presence of Planococcus and Halobacillus has been reported in studies about hypersaline lakes; like La Sal del Rey (USA) (Phillips et al., 2012) and Great Salt Lake (Spring et al., 1996), respectively. The Salinivibrio costicola was a representative model for studies on osmoregulatory and other physiological mechanisms of moderately halophilic bacteria (Oren, 2006).However, it is interesting to note that all strains shared less than 98.7% identity (the usual species cut-off proposed by Yarza et al. (2014) with their closest phylogenetic relative, suggesting that they could be considered as new species. Phenotypic, genetic and phylogenetic analyses have been suggested for the complete identification of these strains. Theses bacterial strains were tested for the production of industrially important enzymes (Amylase, protease, lipase, DNAse and coagulase). These isolates are good candidates as sources of novel enzymes with biotechnological potential as they can be used in different industrial processes at high salt concentration (up to 25% NaCl for B4). Prominent amylase, lipase, protease and DNAase activities have been reported from different hypersaline environments across the globe; e.g., Spain (Sánchez‐Porro et al., 2003), Iran (Rohban et al., 2009), Tunisia (Baati et al., 2010) and India (Gupta et al., 2016). However, to the best of our knowledge, the coagulase activity has never been detected in extreme halophilic bacteria. Isolation and characterization of crude enzymes (especially coagulase) to investigate their properties and stability are in progress.The finding of novel enzymes with optimal activities at various ranges of salt concentrations is of great importance. Besides being intrinsically stable and active at high salt concentrations, halophilic and halotolerant enzymes offer great opportunities in biotechnological applications, such as environmental bioremediation (marine, oilfiel) and food processing. The bacterial isolates were also characterized for production of biosurfactants by oil-spread assay, measurement of surface tension and emulsification index (E24). There are few reports on biosurfactant producers in hypersaline environments and in recent years, there has been a greater increase in interest and importance in halophilic bacteria for biomolecules (Donio et al., 2013; Sarafin et al., 2014). Halophiles, which have a unique lipid composition, may have an important role to play as surface-active agents. The archae bacterial ether-linked phytanyl membrane lipid of the extremely halophilic bacteria has been shown to have surfactant properties (Post and Collins, 1982). Yakimov et al. (1995) reported the production of biosurfactant by a halotolerant Bacillus licheniformis strain BAS 50 which was able to produce a lipopeptide surfactant when cultured at salinities up to 13% NaCl. From solar salt, Halomonas sp. BS4 and Kocuria marina BS-15 were found to be able to produce biosurfactant when cultured at salinities of 8% and 10% NaCl respectively (Donio et al., 2013; Sarafin et al., 2014). In the present work, strains B4 and A4 produce biosurfactant in medium containing respectively 25% and 20% NaCl. To our knowledge, this is the first report on biosurfactant production by bacteria under such salt concentration. Biosurfactants have a wide variety of industrial and environmental applications (Akbari et al., 2018) but their applicability depends on their stability at different environmental conditions. The strain B4 which can produce biosurfactant at 25% NaCl showed good stability in alkaline pH and at a temperature range of 30°C-100°C. Due to the enormous utilization of biosurfactant in detergent manufacture the choice of alkaline biosurfactant is researched (Elazzazy et al., 2015). On the other hand, the interesting finding was the thermostability of the produced biosurfactant even after heat treatment (100°C for 30 min) which suggests the use of this biosurfactant in industries where heating is of a paramount importance (Khopade et al., 2012). To date, more attention has been focused on biosurfactant producing bacteria under extreme conditions for industrial and commercial usefulness. In fact, the biosurfactant produce by strain B4 have promising usefulness in pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food industries and for bioremediation in marine environment and Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) where the salinity, temperature and pH are high.CONCLUSIONThis is the first study on the culturable halophilic bacteria community inhabiting Chott Tinsilt in Eastern Algeria. Different genera of halotolerant bacteria with different phylogeneticaly characteristics have been isolated from this Chott. Culturing of bacteria and their molecular analysis provides an opportunity to have a wide range of cultured microorganisms from extreme habitats like hypersaline environments. Enzymes produced by halophilic bacteria show interesting properties like their ability to remain functional in extreme conditions, such as high temperatures, wide range of pH, and high salt concentrations. These enzymes have great economical potential in industrial, agricultural, chemical, pharmaceutical, and biotechnological applications. Thus, the halophiles isolated from Chott Tinsilt offer an important potential for application in microbial and enzyme biotechnology. In addition, these halo bacterial biosurfactants producers isolated from this Chott will help to develop more valuable eco-friendly products to the pharmacological and food industries and will be usefulness for bioremediation in marine environment and petroleum industry.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSOur thanks to Professor Abdelhamid Zoubir for proofreading the English composition of the present paper.CONFLICT OF INTERESTThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.Akbari, S., N. H. Abdurahman, R. M. Yunus, F. Fayaz and O. R. Alara, 2018. Biosurfactants—a new frontier for social and environmental safety: A mini review. Biotechnology research innovation, 2(1): 81-90.Association, A. P. H., A. W. W. Association, W. P. C. 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Abstract This article examines the entanglement of administration, education, and law in North India under early British rule. While there exists extensive discussion on each of these three themes, historians have not paid enough attention to the processes in which, by the mid-nineteenth century, the official minds of the East India Company gradually came to imagine its revenue administration in North India at the institutional intersection of state bureaucracy, village schools, and the law courts. I will argue in this article that through this intersection of knowledge/law-making, the Company wished to foster an ‘enlightened’ but simultaneously obedient subjecthood among the Indian rural population. The contested relationship between the state, the local Indian officials, and the villagers in general, however, thwarted this patronizing ambition.

This article examines the progression of the two colonies which came to the English crown as a result of the Anglo-Portuguese marriage treaty of 1661, Tangier and Bombay. The years 1662-85 act as the border for this study, taking in the entire duration of Tangier’s existence as an English crown colony and Bombay’s emergence as a settlement of the East India Company. Whilst English Tangier was a noted failure in colonial terms, the long-term development of Bombay proved to be a major success for the British in the subcontinent. Whilst this study will examine these divergent fortunes in social, economic and military terms, questions will also be posed as to the role which royal and chartered trading company patronage played in the success of these two settlements. This in turn will feed into the ongoing debate surrounding global approaches to colonial expansion and empire, as well as demonstrate the benefits and limitations of royal patronage in colonial development.

<div><p><em>After the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the East India Company defeated the Khalsa Army of Lahore Darbar in two Anglo-Sikh Wars. Being astute political masters, the British felt the lurking fear of simmering discontent among the Punjabis against their rule. For safeguarding the logistics of administration, efficacious precautionary measures were undertaken by them to satisfy the grievances of certain sections of the society so that British rule would face lesser political instability and enmity of the natives. After 1857, the British conducted a thorough study of ethnographic, fiscal, geographical, political, social and religious conditions of Punjab and oriented their administrative policies to suit the best interests of the Empire. Far-reaching political, economic and social changes were introduced by the British to strengthen their hold over all branches of administration. A new administrative hierarchy, composed of Anglo-Indian elements was firmly established and it embraced every activity of the state. </em></p></div>

There is a 205-year long history of Gurkha’s entanglement with the British. In 1816, the British East India Company defeated Nepal in the Anglo-Nepalese war. Dominant narratives of this history suggests that the British were impressed by the war-fighting capabilities and loyalty of the Gurkhas, and recruited them- not as mercenaries but part of their army- to fight in the World Wars, to maintain imperial administration in British India, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. After the 1947 Tripartite Agreement between India, Nepal, and Britain, Gurkha soldiers were recruited annually in both British and Indian armies. For decades, the Gurkhas have carried out a movement seeking equal pay and pension in comparison to their British counterpart. After a long struggle, their movement reached the European Court of Human Rights wherein the Court did not find a violation of the European Convention regarding the differential treatment of Gurkha soldiers. The paper, briefly subscribes to the available literatures about the magnitude of problems and the status of Nepali Gurkhas in the British Army, including an overview of the commitments and obligation of United Kingdom towards human rights. The paper fills the scholarly gap by taking international human rights as an analytical framework in approaching the Gurkhas’ issue. In making a case for possible remedies, Gurkhas as ‘rightsholders’ is proposed as a suitable frame. It concludes with recommendations, grounded in international human rights law, as a possible remedial mechanism for the Gurkhas — in their quest of justice.
 "We never got equal terms and pay, and we are not even bothered about that. What we are seeking is justice for our pensions, getting equal to what the British get, according to the service rendered." (Retired major Tikendra Dal Dewan)

The industrial revolution that took place in Europe in the early stages caused
 colonialism in Southeast Asia countries, particularly Britain in Malaya (Tanah Melayu).
 The English colonization opened up space in literature as some of the colonial
 officials wrote their autobiographical works or travelogues bearing their experiences
 witnessed the societies and cultures of the colonies. At the same time there were
 some English officials from the British East India sentenced to work in Malaya who
 took the opportunity to record their travel experiences living here with Malay peoples.
 Swettenham is one of them. But what is not quite good to know is that they recorded
 negative things about Malays. The statements are not exactly accurate. This is because
 it is merely a personal view from the colonial perspectives. This paper intends to
 address the issue of Laziness Malay myth by citing Swettenham’s statements in his
 travelogue entitled Malay Sketches. Frank Swettenham, (born March 28, 1850,Belper,
 Derbyshire, Eng.—died June 11, 1946, London), British colonial official in Malaya who
 was highly influential in shaping British policy and the structure of British administration
 in the Malay Peninsula. He learned the Malay language and played a major role
 as British-Malay intermediary in the events surrounding British intervention in the
 peninsular Malay states in the 1870s. He successfully promoted the development
 of coffee and tobacco estates in the Malay state and helped boost tin earnings by
 constructing a railway from Kuala Lumpur. His services help to energize the industrial
 revolution in England. This conference is a literary privilege that gives scholars the
 opportunity to give a feed back to this Englishman’s allegations to the Malays.


 
 
 From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. 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 Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style
 Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.