‘White Todas’: the politics of race and class amongst European settlers on the Nilgiri Hills, c.1860–1900
The Nilgiri Hills lie in the north-western corner of what is now Tamil Nadu, and was formerly part of the Madras presidency. Before 1799 the Hills had formed a rather detached part of Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore. Although they do appear to have paid revenue, their various tribes lived in comparative isolation, broken only in 1819 when the first European bungalow was constructed on the lower slopes near Kotagiri by the collector of the Coimbatore District. From the 1820s onwards the Hills, and particularly Ootacamund (Ooty), the chief sanatorium, became a popular resort for invalid Europeans, revelling in the ‘half-English’ weather of the plateau, 6,000 feet above sea level. From the 1850s they became fashionable, as well as a health resort, and by 1870 Ooty was acting as the summer capital of the Madras presidency, the seat of government for four to six months of the year. Nevertheless, with an average population density of no more than 127 per square mile in 1901, less than any other district in Madras, and a main town, Ootacamund, of only 18,500 inhabitants, the Nilgiris were of minor economic and demographic significance, and have accordingly attracted little attention from historians since the publication of Sir Frederick Price’s voluminous history in 1908. With or without the familiar diminutive, Ooty is always belittled by the associations of the term ‘hill station’. In imperial and nationalist mythology this implies a place apart, Kipling’s ‘abode of the little tin gods’, divorced from the everyday concerns of the ‘real’ India on the Plains. Dane Kennedy’s The Magic Mountains and Pamela Kanwar’s Imperial Simla are the principal detailed studies of this peculiar urban form, and show clearly that hill stations were no different from other Indian towns in depending on Indian capital and enterprise for their maintenance and development. Despite this, Kipling’s grass-widows and dashing young subalterns still hold centre stage in the popular perception of the hill station, obscuring not only the Indians who made this brittle existence possible, but the substantial numbers of Europeans who came to the hills not to play, but to work. Together with the presidency towns, but for somewhat
Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917
This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916.
Evaluation of CuAl2O4 as an Oxygen Carrier in Chemical-Looping Combustion
The chemical-looping combustion (CLC) process is a novel solution for efficient combustion with intrinsic separation of carbon dioxide. The process uses a metal oxide as an oxygen carrier to transfer oxygen from an air to a fuel reactor where the fuel, or gasification products of the fuel, reacts with the solid oxygen carrier. In this work, copper(II) aluminate (CuAl2O4) was assessed as a potential oxygen carrier using methane as fuel. The carrier particles were produced by freeze–granulation and calcined at 1050 °C for a duration of 6 h. The chemical-looping characteristics were evaluated in a laboratory-scale fluidized-bed reactor in the temperature range of 900–950 °C during 45 alternating redox cycles. The oxygen carrier exhibited reproducible and stable reactivity behavior in this temperature range. Neither agglomeration nor defluidization was noticed in any of the cycles carried out at 900–925 °C. However, after reactivity tests at 950 °C, soft agglomeration and particle fragmentation were observed. Systematic phase analysis of the Cu–Al–O system during the redox cycle was carried out as a function of duration of reduction and oxygen concentration during the oxidation period. It was found that the CuAl2O4 is reduced to copper(I) aluminate (CuAlO2; delafossite), Cu2O, and elemental Cu. The CuAlO2 phase is characterized by slow kinetics for oxidation into CuO and CuAl2O4. Despite this kinetic limitation, complete conversion of methane with reproducible reactivity of the oxygen carrier is achieved. Thus, CuAl2O4 could be a potential oxygen carrier for chemical-looping combustion.