Books in the Studies in Imperialism series

This book is based on the latest research, and involves stimulating new ideas from some of the most important scholars working in the field of imperial history. It ranges across politics, religion, economy, law and geography in order to offer challenging perspectives on the nature and origins of the first British empire. -- .

Mobility was central to the construction, maintenance and dissolution of empires. This book reflects on the social, cultural and political significance of mobile subjects, practices and infrastructures to the British empire from the 1750s through to the 1940s. -- .

The book is a treatment of the British colony in Egypt from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, revealing deep-seated cultural and economic links, while also considering how the mundane concerns of ordinary colonials fared in a strategically vital imperial base, with all its attendant complications. -- .

Examines the nineteenth-century royal tour from the perspectives of various historical actors - including royals, politicians and indigenous people - in order to demonstrate how a multi-valent British culture was created throughout the empire. -- .

The volume builds upon developments in recent years in reconceptualising the British Empire as a system structured around complex, multi-layered networks, which transcended conventionally defined boundaries between metropolitan and colonial space. -- .

A new interpretation of the creative work of well known British imperialists of the late nineteenth and early 20th century, exploring their links with the revolutionary psychological theories of Freud. -- .

This book explores the colonial mentalities that shaped and were shaped by women living in colonial India between 1820 and 1932. Using a broad framework the book examines the many life experiences of these women and how their position changed, both personally and professionally, over this long period of study. Drawing on a rich documentary record from archives in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North America, Ireland and Australia this book builds a clear picture of the colonial-configured changes that influenced women interacting with the colonial state. In the early nineteenth century the role of some women occupying colonial spaces in India was to provide emotional sustenance to expatriate European males serving away from the moral strictures of Britain. However, powerful colonial statecraft intervened in the middle of the century to racialise these women and give them a new official, moral purpose. Only some females could be teachers, chosen by their race as reliable transmitters of genteel accomplishment codes of European, middle-class femininity. Yet colonial female activism also had impact when pressing against these revised, official gender constructions. New geographies of female medical care outreach emerged. Roman Catholic teaching orders, whose activism was sponsored by piety, sought out other female colonial peripheries, some of which the state was then forced to accommodate. Ultimately the national movement built its own gender thresholds of interchange, ignoring the unproductive colonial learning models for females, infected as these models had become with the broader race, class and gender agendas of a fading raj. This book will appeal to students and academics working on the history of empire and imperialism, gender studies, postcolonial studies and the history of education.

This book examines both the turn to indirect rule as a way of mediating and resolving some of the contradictions that had tended to crisis, and the way both indirect rule and settler colonialism were transformed by this new political dispensation. -- .

This book is the story of British consuls at the edge of the British and Chinese empires. By embracing local norms and adapting to transfrontier migration, consuls created forms of transfrontier legal authority. -- .

Oceania under steam is a lively study of empire and the Pacific in the age of steam. It connects the intimate details of shipboard life with the high politics of imperial ocean space to present a wealth of new insights into the significance of shipping and the sea in the everyday life of colonialism. -- .

Explores Indian gender issues through diverse sources including letters, memoirs, fiction, housekeeping manuals, and forgotten texts from the colonial archives. -- .

In this pioneering study, Conley examines the intersection between empire, navy, and manhood in British society from 1870 to 1918. Jack Tar to Union Jack is indispensable reading as it reminds us of the navy's long-standing influence upon British domestic and imperial culture. -- .

Citizenship, nation, empire investigates the extent to which popular imperialism influenced the teaching of history between 1870 and 1930. It is the first book-length study to trace the substantial impact of educational psychology on the teaching of history, probing its impact on textbooks, literacy primers and teacher-training manuals. Educationists identified 'enlightened patriotism' to be the core objective of historical education. This was neither tub-thumping jingoism, nor state-prescribed national-identity teaching, but rather a carefully crafted curriculum for all children which fused civic as well as imperial ambitions. The book will be of interest to those studying or researching aspects of English domestic imperial culture, especially those concerned with questions of childhood and schooling, citizenship, educational publishing and anglo-British relations. Given that vitriolic debates about the politics of history teaching have endured into the twenty-first century, Citizenship, nation, empire is a timely study of the formative influences that shaped the history curriculum in English schools

This book examines the British cultural engagement with Hong Kong in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how the territory fit unusually within Britain's decolonisation narratives and served as an occasional foil for examining Britain's own culture during a period of perceived stagnation and decline. Drawing on a wide range of archival and published primary sources, Hong Kong and British culture, 1945-97 investigates such themes as Hong Kong as a site of unrestrained capitalism, modernisation, and good government, as well as an arena of male social and sexual opportunity. It also examines the ways in which Hong Kong Chinese embraced British culture, and the competing predictions that British observers made concerning the colony's return to Chinese sovereignty. An epilogue considers the enduring legacy of British colonialism. This book will be essential reading for historians of Hong Kong, British decolonisation, and Britain's culture of declinism.

Provides an original and challenging perspective on the history of chocolate, questioning the romantic images of the commodity offered in marketing campaigns. It weaves together a variety of previously unexamined sources including oral histories of women workers, advertising material from the Rowntree and Cadbury companies and archival material. -- .

Focussing on radicals and reformers this book explores the role of music in transmitting political culture across the Anglophone world over time and distance. It brings to light the importance of music in the lived experience of politics of those who composed, performed and consumed it. It provides an opportunity to hear history as it happened. -- .

One solution to West Indian problems after 1940 was to transform sugarcane into a raw material for making synthetics. Britain hoped to encourage new industry by providing scientific information that business might exploit. This plan was threatened by American promotion of a different model of development. -- .

The Colonial Medical Service was the personnel section of the Colonial Service, employing the doctors who tended to the health of both the colonial staff and the local populations of the British Empire. Although the Service represented the pinnacle of an elite government agency, its reach in practice stretched far beyond the state, with the members of the African service collaborating, formally and informally, with a range of other non-governmental groups. This collection of essays on the Colonial Medical Service of Africa illustrates the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zanzibar. They reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of imperial rule in Africa. The book provides essential reading for scholars and students of colonial history, medical history and colonial administration.

Thie books investigates controversies surrounding prostitution, homosexuality and the age of consent in the British Empire, and draws conclusions about the importance of sex as a nexus of imperial power relations. It will be of particular interest to academics and students in Geography, History, Postcolonial Criticism and Gender/Sexuality Studies. -- .

provides the first comparative overview of the role of anthropology in colonial Africa. With essays exploring metropolitan research institutes, Africans as ethnographers and the transnational features of knowledge production, this volume both consolidates and extends a range of new research questions focusing on the politics of imperial knowledge. -- .

Presents a study of the 1947 drawing of the Indo-Pakistani boundary in Punjab. This book highlights British efforts to maintain a grip on India even as the decolonization process spun out of control. It demonstrates that it was not the location of the line but flaws in the larger partition process that caused the mass violence and chaos of 1947.

Examines the origins and development of museums in six major regions of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book analyzes museum histories in major centers in Canada, South Africa, Australia, India and South-East Asia, setting them into the economic and social contexts of the cities in which they were located.

Studying the demise of the British Empire after World War II from a cultural perspective rather than a political or economic one, this text argues that the social and cultural impact of decolonisation had as significant an effect on the imperial centre as on the colonial periphery.

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.

The first full-length book to deal with Scottish emigration to South Africa and the resulting conflicts and relationships with African peoples. Deals with exploration, scientific endeavour, military campaigns, Christian missions, western education, intellectual institutions and the professions, technology, business, commerce and journalism.

This book follows Thomas Jones, the first Welsh missionary from rural Wales to Cherrapunji, now one of the most Christianised parts of India. It foregrounds broader political, scientific, racial and military ideologies that mobilised the Khasi Hills into an interconnected network of imperial control. -- .