Studies in Imperialism Series

Human capital and empire compares the role of Scots, Irish and Welsh within the English East India Company between c. 1690 and c. 1820. It focuses on why the three groups developed such distinctive and different profiles within the corporation and its wider colonial activities in Asia. Besides contributing to the national histories of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, it uses these societies to ask how ‘poorer’ regions of Europe participated in global empire. The chapters cover involvement in the Company’s administrative, military, medical, maritime and private trade activities. The analysis conceives of sojourning to Asia as a cycle of human capital, with human mobility used to access a key sector of world trade. As well as providing essential new statistical information on Irish, Scottish and Welsh participation, it makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on the legacies of empire.

Colonial masculinity breaks new ground by placing masculinity at the centre of colonial and nationalist politics in late nineteenth century India. Mrinalini Sinha situates the analysis very specifically in the context of an imperial social formation, examining colonial masculinity not only in the context of social forces within India but also as framed by and framing political, economic and ideological shifts in Britain.

Britannia's children looks at the roots of society's perception of racial difference through the establishment and diffusion of the image of imperial peoples in the period before and after the First World War. Focusing on materials produced for children, by textbook historians and the popular press, it provides an important study of both the socialisation of the young and the source of race perceptions in twentieth-century British society. Britannia's children introduces the reader to the imperial images of the Indian, African and Chinese - created for the youth of Britain through their history textbooks and popular periodicals. By close study of the characterisation of the 'other', shaped in this era, one can see how the young learned both the lessons of imperial allegiance and a perception of racial difference which would influence many generations to follow. This revealing book shows how society secures the rising generation in the beliefs of the parent society, and how the myths of race and nationality became an integral part of Britain's own process of self-identification. Written for historians, educators and a wider audience with an interest in the issues of race and society, this book makes important reading for those who wish to understand both the popularisation of the imperial idea and the legacy of its workings in contemporary society.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Through a study of the British Empire’s largest women’s patriotic organisation, formed in 1900, and still in existence, this book examines the relationship between female imperialism and national identity. It throws new light on women’s involvement in imperialism; on the history of ‘conservative’ women’s organisations; on women’s interventions in debates concerning citizenship and national identity; and on the history of women in white settler societies. After placing the IODE (Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire) in the context of recent scholarly work in Canadian, gender, imperial history and post-colonial theory, the book follows the IODE’s history through the twentieth century. Tracing the organisation into the postcolonial era, where previous imperial ideas are outmoded, it considers the transformation from patriotism to charity, and the turn to colonisation at home in the Canadian North.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book focuses on the ways in which the British settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa treated indigenous peoples in relation to political rights, commencing with the imperial policies of the 1830s and ending with the national political settlements in place by 1910. Drawing on a wide range of sources, its comparative approach provides an insight into the historical foundations of present-day controversies in these settler societies.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The first comprehensive discussion of the major Caribbean thinkers who came to Britain. Written in an accessible, lively style, with a range of wonderful and distinguished authors. Key book for thinking about the future of multicultural Britain; study thus far has concentrated on Caribbean literature and how authors ‘write back’ to Britain – this book is the first to consider how they ‘think back’ to Britain. A book of the moment - nothing comparable on the Carribean influence on Britain.. Discusses the influence, amongst others, of C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This is a detailed study of the various ways in which London and India were imaginatively constructed by British observers during the nineteenth century. This process took place within a unified field of knowledge that brought together travel and evangelical accounts to exert a formative influence on the creation of London and India for the domestic reading public. Their distinct narratives, rhetoric and chronologies forged homologies between representations of the metropolitan poor and colonial subjects – those constituencies that were seen as the most threatening to imperial progress. Thus the poor and particular sections of the Indian population were inscribed within discourses of western civilization as regressive and inferior peoples. Over time these discourses increasingly promoted notions of overt and rigid racial hierarchies, of which a legacy still remains. Drawing upon cultural and intellectual history this comparative study seeks to rethink the location of the poor and India within the nineteenth-century imagination.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The Victorian soldier in Africa re-examines the campaign experience of British soldiers in Africa during the period, 1874–1902 – the zenith of the Victorian imperial expansion – and does so from the perspective of the regimental soldier. The book utilises an unprecedented number of letters and diaries, written by regimental officers and other ranks, to allow soldiers to speak for themselves about their experience of colonial warfare. The sources demonstrate the adaptability of the British army in fighting in different climates, over demanding terrain and against a diverse array of enemies. They also uncover soldiers’ responses to army reforms of the era as well as the response to the introduction of new technologies of war. Moreover, the book provides commentary on soldiers’ views of commanding officers and politicians alongside assessment of war correspondents, colonial auxiliaries and African natives in their roles as bearers, allies and enemies. This book reveals new insights on imperial and racial attitudes within the army, on relations between soldiers and the media and the production of information and knowledge from frontline to homefront. It will make fascinating reading for students, academics and enthusiasts in imperial history, Victorian studies, military history and colonial warfare.

This is the first book wholly devoted to assessing the array of links between Scotland and the Caribbean in the later eighteenth century. It uses a wide range of archival sources to paint a detailed picture of the lives of thousands of Scots who sought fortunes and opportunities, as Burns wrote, ‘across th’ Atlantic roar’. It outlines the range of their occupations as planters, merchants, slave owners, doctors, overseers, and politicians, and shows how Caribbean connections affected Scottish society during the period of ‘improvement’. The book highlights the Scots’ reinvention of the system of clanship to structure their social relations in the empire and finds that involvement in the Caribbean also bound Scots and English together in a shared Atlantic imperial enterprise and played a key role in the emergence of the British nation and the Atlantic World.

This groundbreaking book challenges standard interpretations of metropolitan strategies of rule in the early nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars, the British government ruled a more diverse empire than ever before, and the Colonial Office responded by cultivating strong personal links with governors and colonial officials through which influence, patronage and information could flow. By the 1830s the conviction that personal connections were the best way of exerting influence within the imperial sphere went well beyond the metropolitan government, as lobbyists, settlers and missionaries also developed personal connections to advance their causes. However, the successive crises in the 1830s exposed these complicated networks of connection to hostile metropolitan scrutiny. This book challenges traditional notions of a radical revolution in government, identifying a more profound and general transition from a metropolitan reliance on gossip and personal information to the embrace of new statistical forms of knowledge. The analysis moves between London, New South Wales and the Cape Colony, encompassing both government insiders and those who struggled against colonial and imperial governments.

This is the first book-length study of the ideological foundations of British imperialism in the twentieth century. Drawing on the thinking of imperial activists, publicists, ideologues, and travelers such as Lionel Curtis, John Buchan, Arnold White, Richard Jebb and Thomas Sedgwick, this book offers a comparative history of how the idea of imperial citizenship took hold in early twentieth-century Britain, and how it helped foster the articulation of a broader British world. It reveals how imperial citizenship as a form of imperial identity was challenged by voices in both Britain and the empire, and how it influenced later imperial developments such as the immigration to Britain of ‘imperial citizens’ from the colonies after the Second World War. A work of political, intellectual and cultural history, the book re-incorporates the histories of the settlement colonies into imperial history, and suggests the importance of comparative history in understanding the imperial endeavour. It will be of interest to students of imperialism, British political and intellectual history, and of the various former dominions.

The description of South Africa as a 'rainbow nation' has always been taken to embrace the black, brown and white peoples who constitute its population. But each of these groups can be sub-divided and in the white case, the Scots have made one of the most distinctive contributions to the country's history. Now available in paperback, this book is a full-length study of their role from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. It highlights the interaction of Scots with African peoples, the manner in which missions and schools were credited with producing 'Black Scotsmen' and the ways in which they pursued many distinctive policies. It also deals with the inter-weaving of issues of gender, class and race as well as with the means by which Scots clung to their ethnicity through founding various social and cultural societies. This book offers a major contribution to both Scottish and South African history and in the process illuminates a significant field of the Scottish Diaspora that has so far received little attention.

The Colonisation of Time is a highly original and long overdue examination of the ways that western-European and specifically British concepts and rituals of time were imposed on other cultures as a fundamental component of colonisation during the nineteenth century. Based on a wealth of primary sources, it explores the intimate relationship between the colonisation of time and space in two British settler-colonies (Victoria, Australia and the Cape Colony, South Africa) and its instrumental role in the exportation of Christianity, capitalism, and modernity, thus adding new depth to our understanding of imperial power and of the ways in which it was exercised and limited. All those intrigued by the concept of time will find this book of interest, for it illustrates how western-European time’s rise to a position of global dominance—from the clock to the seven-day week—is one of the most pervasive, enduring and taken-for-granted legacies of colonisation in today’s world.

At the start of the twenty-first century we are acutely conscious that universities operate within an entangled world of international scholarly connection. Now available in paperback, Empire of scholars examines the networks that linked academics across the colonial world in the age of ‘Victorian’ globalization. Stretching across the globe, these networks helped map the boundaries of an expansive but exclusionary ‘British academic world’ that extended beyond the borders of the British Isles. Drawing on extensive archival research conducted in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, this book remaps the intellectual geographies of Britain and its empire. In doing so, it provides a new context for writing the history of ideas and offers a critical analysis of the connections that helped fashion the global world of universities today.

The essays in this volume have been written by leading experts in their respective fields and bring together established scholars with a new generation of migration and transnational historians. Their work weaves together the ‘new’ imperial and the ‘new’ migration histories, and is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the interplay of migration within and between the local, regional, imperial, and transnational arenas. Furthermore, these essays set an important analytical benchmark for more integrated and comparative analyses of the range of migratory processes – free and coerced – which together impacted on the dynamics of power, forms of cultural circulation and making of ethnicities across a British imperial world.

From the height of ‘New Imperialism’ until the Second World War, three generations of heroes of the British and French empires in Africa were selected, manufactured and packaged for consumption by a metropolitan public eager to discover new horizons and to find comfort in the concept of a ‘civilising mission’. This book looks at imperial heroism by examining the legends of a dozen major colonial figures on both sides of the Channel, revisiting the familiar stories of Livingstone, Gordon and Kitchener from a radically new angle, and throwing light on their French counterparts, often less famous in the Anglophone world but certainly equally fascinating.

Race and empire tells the story of a short-lived but vehement eugenics movement that emerged among a group of Europeans in Kenya in the 1930s, unleashing a set of writings on racial differences in intelligence more extreme than that emanating from any other British colony in the twentieth century. The Kenyan eugenics movement of the 1930s adapted British ideas to the colonial environment: in all its extremity, Kenyan eugenics was not simply a bizarre and embarrassing colonial mutation, as it was later dismissed, but a logical extension of British eugenics in a colonial context. By tracing the history of eugenic thought in Kenya, the book shows how the movement took on a distinctive colonial character, driven by settler political preoccupations and reacting to increasingly outspoken African demands for better, and more independent, education. Through a close examination of attitudes towards race and intelligence in a British colony, Race and empire reveals how eugenics was central to colonial racial theories before World War Two.

Missionary families were an integral component of the missionary enterprise, both as active agents on the global religious stage and as a force within the enterprise that shaped understandings and theories of mission itself. Taking the family as a legitimate unit of historical analysis in its own right for the first time, Missionary families traces changing familial policies and lived realities throughout the nineteenth century and powerfully argues for the importance of an historical understanding of the missionary enterprise informed by the complex interplay between the intimate, the personal and the professional. By looking at marriage, parenting and childhood; professionalism, vocation and domesticity; race, gender and generation, this first in-depth study of missionary families reveals their profound importance to the missionary enterprise, and concludes that mission history can no longer be written without attention to the personal, emotional and intimate aspects of missionary lives.

This book appraises the critical contribution of the Studies in Imperialism series to the writing of imperial histories as the series passes its 100th publication. The volume brings together some of the most distinguished scholars writing today to explore the major intellectual trends in Imperial history, with a particular focus on the cultural readings of empire that have flourished over the last generation. When the Studies in Imperialism series was founded, the discipline of Imperial history was at what was probably its lowest ebb. A quarter of a century on, there has been a tremendous broadening of the scope of what the study of empire encompasses. Essays in the volume consider ways in which the series and the wider historiography have sought to reconnect British and imperial histories; to lay bare the cultural expressions and registers of colonial power; and to explore the variety of experiences the home population derived from the empire.

This collection is a study of the process by which European planning concepts and practices were transmitted, diffused and diverted in various colonial territories and situations. The socio-political, geographical and cultural implications are analysed here through case studies from the global South, namely from French and British colonial territories in Africa as well as from Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine. The book focuses on the transnational aspects of the garden city, taking into account frameworks and documentation that extend beyond national borders, and includes contributions from an international network of specialists. Their comparative views and geographical focus challenge the conventional, Eurocentric approach to garden cities, and will interest students and scholars of planning history and colonial history.

David Livingstone, the ‘missionary-explorer’, has attracted more commentary than nearly any other Victorian hero. Beginning in the years following his death, he soon became the subject of a major biographical tradition. Yet out of this extensive discourse, no unified image of Livingstone emerges. Rather, he has been represented in diverse ways and in a variety of socio-political contexts. Until now, no one has explored Livingstone’s posthumous reputation in full. This book meets the challenge. In approaching Livingstone’s complex legacy, it adopts a metabiographical perspective: in other words, this book is a biography of biographies. Rather than trying to uncover the true nature of the subject, metabiography is concerned with the malleability of biographical representation. It does not aim to uncover Livingstone’s ‘real’ identity, but instead asks: what has he been made to mean? Crossing disciplinary boundaries, Livingstone’s 'lives' will interest scholars of imperial history, postcolonialism, life-writing, travel-writing and Victorian studies.

This book recovers the lost history of colonial Algeria’s communist movement. Meticulously researched – and the only English-language book on the Parti Communiste Algérien – it explores communism’s complex relationship with Algerian nationalism. During international crises, such as the Popular Front and Second World War years, the PCA remained close to its French counterpart, but as the national liberation struggle intensified, the PCA’s concern with political and social justice attracted growing numbers of Muslims. When the Front de Libération Nationale launched armed struggle in November 1954, the PCA maintained its organisational autonomy – despite FLN pressure. They participated fully in the national liberation war, facing the French state’s wrath. Independence saw two conflicting socialist visions, with the PCA’s incorporated political pluralism and class struggle on the one hand, and the FLN demand for a one-party socialist state on the other. The PCA’s pluralist vision was shattered when it was banned by the one-party state in November 1962. This book is of particular interest to students and scholars of Algerian history, French colonial history and communist history.

This book investigates development in British, French and Portuguese colonial Africa during the last decades of colonial rule. During this period, development became the central concept underpinning the relationship between metropolitan Europe and colonial Africa. Combining historiographical accounts with analyses from other academic viewpoints, this book investigates a range of contexts, from agriculture to mass media. With its focus on the conceptual side of development and its broad geographical scope, it offers new and unique perspectives. An extensive introduction contextualises the individual chapters and makes the book an up-to-date point of entry into the subject of colonial development, not only for a specialist readership, but also for students of history, development and postcolonial studies. Written by scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, Developing Africa is a uniquely international dialogue on this vital chapter of twentieth-century transnational history.