Colonial knowledge and the military in India, 1780–1860

Military officers and surgeons played a critical role in the collection, analysis and dissemination of knowledge in colonial India. Yet the little attention to date that has been directed at scholars with military backgrounds has treated their army service as incidental to, rather than formative of, their contributions to knowledge of India. While not all were actively engaged in intellectual pursuits, a surprisingly large number of orientalists came from the army. In some cases, this can be attributed to the military's need for specific information. But such strictly utilitarian motives were not always at work; boredom, curiosity and professional aspirations encouraged officers and surgeons to take up scientific, literary and artistic activities. Military service also offered opportunities for travel, as well as technical training, which furthered such pursuits. Consequently, much of the colonial knowledge that was generated in the first century of colonial rule was tinged with military values and it was sometimes framed in language redolent of the army. This would in turn help to popularise certain readings of Indian society, particularly those which stressed the medieval and fragmented nature of Indian society. The boundaries between fact and fiction became blurred as romanticism came to influence British aesthetic, historical and scientific encounters with India.     

‘Britishness’, Colonial Governance and Education: St Helenian Children in Colonial Natal in the 1870s

This article considers understandings of ‘Britishness’ in the Natal colony in the 1870s. Focusing on St Helenian children’s expulsion from ‘government’ schools that were ostensibly open to all racial groups, the article shows how competing definitions of race and ‘Britishness’ shaped the responses of colonial officials, settlers and the St Helenian community to the expulsion. The white settler population in Natal was concerned about St Helenian economic migrants’ inclusion in white, English society. In particular, the ambiguous racial status of St Helenians was seen as potentially harmful to white children. The focus on a group of recent incomers to the colony uncovers a process of racialisation unfolding in the context of migrations within the British Empire. The case highlights how movement and migration within the empire could bring these definitions of race and Britishness into conversation and conflict with each other.     

Colonial Emulation,Competition and Opportunism: A Twentieth-Century Spanish Perspective on the British and French ‘Empire Projects’

ABSTRACT

Through the views of Francisco Franco’s major adviser on African Affairs, this paper reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the long-standing interaction between competing ‘imperial projects’ in the twentieth century. Tomás García Figueras’s (1892–1981) speeches, writings and personal archive provide a long-term and well-informed Spanish perspective on the British and French colonial systems, offering us a model to make sense of three major aspects of inter-imperial relations: emulation, competition, and opportunism. Through this insight into the dynamics of imperial interaction, and the ever-evolving dialogues and exchanges between ‘empire projects’ from around the European peninsula, this article provides some key elements to answer the long-standing question of what motivates empires to expand, adapt, or contract. It illuminates the ways in which officials engaged in the day-to-day running of European empires looked at each other, in search for examples and counter-examples, emulation or, simply, opportunities. Crucially, it illustrates how ‘empire projects’ of varying clout interacted with each other, within the limits of realpolitik but well beyond linguistic obstacles, as the multilingual material assembled in the García Figueras archive clearly attests. It also charts, among national and socio-cultural circles hitherto neglected, the evolution in thinking about colonialism and decolonisation throughout the twentieth century.     

The Governor and the Enslaved: An Archaeology of Colonial Modernity at Marshall’s Pen, Jamaica

The rise of modernity in Europe resulted in the redefinition of social relations between those in control of the apparatus of the state and economy on the one hand, and those who worked and lived within that apparatus on the other. This shift in the definition of the basic social unit from subject to individual citizen was fraught with tension, and resulted in vast changes in the lives of colonized people throughout the European sphere of control. The social and material manifestations of these historical processes were many; this article considers how phenomena associated with colonial modernity impacted the lives of people enslaved at Marshall’s Pen, a Jamaican coffee plantation, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. To this end, this article examines the negotiation of the social and material realities of nineteenth-century colonialism through the spread of mass-produced goods mediated through the rise of consumerism visible through archaeologically recovered material culture, the imposition of age-grade, gendered, ethnic and racial categorizations as manifestations of a rationalized social order, the increased focus on the individual as a self-regulating member of a moralized social order, and shifting definitions of the relationships between space and social organization reflecting in changing settlement patterns of village life.     

Ottoman Maps of the Empire’s Arab Provinces, 1850s to the First World War

In recent years the central Ottoman archive in Istanbul has been gradually releasing and computerizing thousands of maps stored in its collections. Our study introduces 137 maps already available to researchers that focus either directly or indirectly as part of broader presentations of imperial domains on the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces. These maps, which all date to between the middle of the nineteenth century and the First World War, differ widely in character, content and function. The maps are briefly described according to their content and set in their historical context.     

Colonial Research and the Social Sciences at the End of Empire: The West Indian Social Survey, 1944–57

After the ending of slavery the West Indian colonies were marginalised in British imperial consciousness but the major disturbances of the 1930s jolted the complacency of colonial administrators and aroused more widespread concern over lack of development. At the same time, there was greater official recognition of the academic social sciences in formulating policies to promote colonial development and counter mounting threats to empire. This article focuses on a major study carried out in Jamaica in the late 1940s, the West Indian Social Survey, whose main brief was to research aspects of African Caribbean culture that acted as a barrier to progress. It evaluates the context, origins and conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the project, looks at problems encountered by the researchers during the survey and in publishing the findings and, finally, considers the impact of the research on academic knowledge and policy making. A key theme is the relationship between the Colonial Office, the academics on the Colonial Social Science Research Council who sponsored and supervised the project, and the research team in the field. Problems in the inception and management of the project and publication of research findings raise questions as to who were the gatekeepers of academic knowledge and how such knowledge was constructed and disseminated.     

‘Operation Legacy’: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide

The end of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century was accompanied by a large-scale rearrangement of sensitive colonial records worldwide. A great number of these records were destroyed and a sizeable portion sent to Britain to be kept secret. This article advances studies of this policy, eventually code-named ‘Operation Legacy’, by reading the ‘migrated archives’ that have been newly discovered and declassified in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. It asks where the policy was decided, for what reason and how it was carried out. Sources suggest that the policy was not planned in the Colonial Office in London and delivered to the colonies in a hierarchical fashion, but, rather, significant elements of the policy were developed in the colonial governments overseas in response to each local context. The general idea was to save Britain’s honour and to protect its collaborators. However, the limitations in terms of time and manpower often prevented the officers from putting sufficient thought into the actual screening of the documents. At the same time, some officers demonstrated a level of historical awareness regarding their actions. The episode reminds us that the official mind as it relates to decolonisation is to be understood not only by reference to the highest levels of strategic planning but also in terms of how it worked at the lower levels, in the colonial administrations on the ground.     

‘Phrases Make History Here’: Churchill,Ireland and the Rhetoric of Empire

In the history of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial 1946–48, it is generally held that the United States was the dominating presence: General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, not only convened the court, but also openly insisted on an exoneration of the Japanese emperor; and American lawyers headed the prosecution team and assumed much of the workload for the defence. However, government documents, including correspondence from and to the participants, show that the Commonwealth governments exerted significant influence in many crucial matters, such as the drafting of the indictment and the judgment of the court. This article questions the standard emphasis on America's role and takes a fresh look at the relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth of Nations.     

‘The Laws of his Own Country’: Defamation,Banishment and the Problem of Legal Pluralism in the 1820s Cape Colony

In 1824 the Cape colony was rocked by three criminal libel trials brought by the colonial administration against settlers who had criticised its officials. To further silence their critics, a recently established colonial newspaper was suppressed and an order banishing its editor was issued by executive decree without judicial process. While these actions are well known to historians of South Africa, the important legal and constitutional issues they raised have not been properly recognised. In tracking the controversy that these trials unleashed in London, Cape Town and other colonial localities, this article argues that these events must be situated within a broader crisis of legal pluralism playing out within the British Empire. The confusion between English and Dutch law highlighted by these cases and their aftermath reveals constitutional debates that underscore the deep contingency of conquest law at a highly unstable legal and political moment. The political disputes inspired by these actions demonstrate that conflicts between variants of European law need to be more clearly recognised as instrumental to the strengthened implementation of British imperial legal hierarchies in colonial localities through the 1820s and 1830s.     

Colonial Servicemen and their British ‘War Brides’: First World War Marriages in the British Empire

This article uses the phenomenon and failure of war marriages between British women and ‘colonial’ servicemen, mostly from the settler dominions, to explore the gendered, classed and racialised conditions of migration after the First World War. Positioning this migration of British war brides as part of the continued normalisation of settler occupation, the article demonstrates the patriarchal social expectations to which white women were subject. Fears of ‘khaki fever’ were extended to the protection of naïve ‘colonial’ soldiers from the manipulative sexuality of white, particularly working-class, women and girls. At the same time, ‘respectable’ women were prepared for frontier life and protected from the indignities of bigamy and desertion. The emphasis on their role as ‘daughters of Empire’ meant ‘undesirable’ matches and marital failure, as reported by the press, had consequences for the closeness of the imperial family and the maintenance of white superiority. The mediation of mobility in cases of mixed-race marriage indicate a more explicit, and sometimes violent, policing of the sexual independence of women and Black and indigenous men of colour. In doing so, the article makes an important contribution to understandings of the legacies of global mobilisation and colonial encounters during the First World War.     

Truth as historical recapitulation: the dead of Cape Town’s District One

In this essay, I reflect on the massive and dramatic re-emergence of the dead of Cape Town’s District One in 2003, and its aftermath. I discuss how the resurfacing of these ancestors helps us understand how heritage discourses operate in Cape Town, and how their agency forces us to consider what it means to live in the city during post-apartheid urban renewal. I argue that the agency of the District One dead hinges on their exposure of the internal workings of discourse and the associated disciplinary practices through which we experience Cape Town and its heritage. This story ends ambiguously. I discuss how, following the storage of the District One dead in the Prestwich Ossuary, the gaze on Cape Town was redirected away from the city’s past and towards its future; I explore how their reinterment foreclosed a series of discussions regarding the reconciliation of past events with the present realities of Cape Town. I argue, finally, that truth at District One can be understood as a form of historical recapitulation.     

Bridgeheads, ‘Colonial Places’ and the Queensland Financial Crisis of 1866

This article provides a new perspective on the links between British imperialism and metropolitan finance by showing how formal power reinforced ‘money power’ at a formative stage in the political development of the colony of Queensland. In 1866, despite the contraction of the bridgeheads of formal British authority in eastern Australia, local imperial representatives quickly aligned with private interests when British investments appeared to be threatened by a proposal to introduce a fiduciary note issue. Subsequently, Queensland politicians continued to contest the control of money and the scope of government intervention in the colonial economy. Ultimately, however, the inflow of British capital created new bridgeheads of British power in Queensland, re-constituting it as a ‘colonial place’ in the informal empire of investment and influence.     

‘Poor heathens’, ‘Cone-headed natives’ and ‘Good water’: the production of knowledge of the interior of Australia through German texts from around the 1860s

This essay critically reviews the textual archive related to the two German mission stations in the South Australian Lake Eyre basin: the Lutheran Hermannsburg mission at Killalpaninna and the Moravian mission at Kopperamanna. The multiple entanglements of these stations far beyond their missionary activity become evident through examining distinctly religious material, such as mission journals, and secular texts, in German-language newspapers and scientific journals. These include entanglement in German domestic affairs as well as German diasporic politics; and in debates over scientific advancement and British colonial expansion.