The imperial race and the immigration sieve: The Canadian debate on assisted British migration and empire settlement, 1900–30

During the 1920s assisted migration from Britain sparked a complex and often bitter debate in Canada. It had long been held that migrants who required assistance were highly unlikely to make desirable new citizens. While the great majority of Anglo-Canadians wished to see increased British immigration in order to strengthen imperial ties and maintain the cultural character of their nation, they feared an influx of ‘unfit’, unemployed urban workers. In some quarters, these negative attitudes intensified as a result of Empire settlement schemes. Complaints about assisted migrants have been interpreted by some historians as evidence of growing nationalist, anti-imperial feeling in Canada. However, a broader overview of the debate indicates that many observers blamed the problems of Empire settlement on Canadian economic and social conditions, calling for reforms that would help British newcomers to succeed. At the end of the 1920s, even the strongest critics of assisted migration were still eager to encourage British settlement, provided that the immigrants could be drawn from rural areas rather than the cities.     

Practising the British way of famine: technologies of relief, 1770–1985

In the past 200 years Britons have responded to famines in particular ways. This article explores these particularities by focusing not simply on the remarkably unchanging humanitarian representation of the victims of famine but on the changing technologies through which relief was collected and distributed. It shows how technologies of famine relief were created from the need to govern colonial populations rather than from the development of new sentimentality and ethics. The authors seek to demonstrate that, despite the changing nature of these technologies, the forms of expertise that sustained them, a set of routines and practices developed that allowed the performance of a British way with famine that slowly extended from the empire to the world. In the wake of two world wars these forms of expertise were extended to Europe and became internationalised through the work of voluntary organisations. After the formal end of Empire, these technologies were retooled and used to assist places in postcolonial Africa. They also helped create a new type of global citizen, informed of technologies of relief and invested in the Global South through the rise of a humanitarian culture.     

‘The Best Laid Plans’: The Development of British Battle-Fleet Tactics, 1919–1942

This paper provides a fresh overview of the much-debated Leith-Ross mission to China in 1935–6, in which Britain assisted the Chinese government's efforts to establish a new currency. It demonstrates that the mission should be understood primarily as an attempt to revive Britain's economic and political stake in East Asia. It argues that, while the government in London undoubtedly wished to see the amelioration of the tense relationship with Japan, the history of the mission demonstrates that it was not prepared to make significant sacrifices that would undermine British interests in China. It thus criticises the contention that the mission should be understood primarily as an exercise in appeasement and contends that in practice it constituted a challenge to Japan's claim to regional domination.     

The Burial of the Dead: the British Army on the Western Front, 1914–18

Abstract

This article examines the ‘war culture’ that developed within the British Army with regard to death and burial on the Western Front. Soldiers on the battle?elds responded to the presence of death and the bodies of the dead through a speci?c framework that was used to understand this perverse and violent landscape. This drew upon pre-war practices and emphasized the physicality of the corpse in the desire to ensure a ‘decent’ burial for a ‘pal’.