The Tools of the Master Slavery and Empire in Nineteenth Century ...

The Occasional Papers of the School of Social Science are versions of talks given at the
School’s weekly Thursday Seminar. At these seminars, Members present work-in-progress
and then take questions. There is often lively conversation and debate, some of which will
be included with the papers. We have chosen papers we thought would be of interest to a
broad audience. Our aim is to capture some part of the cross-disciplinary conversations that
are the mark of the School’s programs. While members are drawn from specific disciplines
of the social sciences—anthropology, economics, sociology and political science—as well as
history, philosophy, literature and law, the School encourages new approaches that arise from
exposure to different forms of interpretation. The papers in this series differ widely in their
topics, methods, and disciplines. Yet they concur in a broadly humanistic attempt to understand
how—and under what conditions—the concepts that order experience in different
cultures and societies are produced, and how they change.
Eve Troutt Powell is Assistant Professor of History at the Unviersity of Georgia. She is working
on a manuscript tentatively entitled: “Different Shades of Colonialism: Egypt, Great
Britain and the Mastery of the Sudan, 1865-1925.” The paper here is an early formulation
of the problem that the book will throughly examine.
Professor Troutt Powell was a Member during the year 1999-2000 (the editor regrets the
delay in the publication of her paper). In that year, Members addressed the theme of the
“universalism of human rights.” Member projects took on questions such as: “What is the
history of the idea that human rights are universal rights? What has been the political
impact of recent human rights campaigns? What sorts of cultural (legal, religious, international)
conflicts have emerged in the name of, or in opposition to, calls for the enforcement
of human rights? Members were urged to examine these questions in concretely
located examples or problems. Over the course of the year, in the comparative process of
discussing their local cases with one another, the question came to be how a “universal” right
can be determined or understood when weighed within specific historical or cultural
situations—and why the staking of such transcendental claims may be necessary. This
paper, and the longer work from which it is drawn, at first seems to examine the question as
the history of a past era; by the end, one has a better sense of how the examination of
“history” only better exposes the fundamentals of contemporary challenges.