‘Science in the Hands of Love’: British Evangelical Missionaries and Colonial Development in Africa,c. 1940–60

During the era of colonial development, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS) revitalised their work by taking advantage of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act to uplift British Africa. These evangelical organisations did not simply appropriate governmental ideas of development, but formulated their own concepts based on the incarnational theology of the ‘whole man’ with body and soul. In implementing their developmental policies, these evangelicals promoted Christ's example of a ‘servant’ to guide missionary conduct as they encountered increased African criticism of colonialism following the Second World War. Both organisations shifted to focusing more closely on souls rather than bodies when African independence movements strengthened during the mid and late 1950s in hopes that Christian ideology would steer Africans towards Christian democracies. By 1960, the CMS and LMS stressed their relationship within the ecumenical Church in their efforts to emancipate themselves from their colonial ties. Through examining missionary discourse on colonial development, this article reveals not only the complexity of development discourse, but also the various ways in which evangelical missionary organisations sought relevance within the context of the Cold War, the rise of the welfare and expert state, and decolonisation.     

Labour Geography of the National Question in Times of Decolonisation: Sharecropper Politics in Western Punjab,c. 1945–1953

This article examines the labour geographies of nationalism through sharecropper “articulations” of anti-colonialism. I study the Punjab Kisan (peasant) Committee at the eve and dawn of Pakistan’s independence from British colonialism. I analyse their actions and claims through newsletters, activist memoirs, and colonial reports. I situate them in relation to other social and political forces: the state, landlords, and Muslim nationalists. Whereas labour geography has often ignored nationalism, I outline an approach for the sub-field to address this gap. First, subaltern nationalisms re-articulate labour, land, gender, and religion in place-specific ways. Second, exclusionary and liberatory nationalisms are variegated responses to the dynamics of being integrated to an imperialist world-economy. This study found these multi-religious peasant committees articulated sovereignty over labour, land, and social reproduction with the national question. Further, this article contributes to the subaltern and labour historiography of Pakistan.     

Immigrants and Apprentices: Solutions to the Post-War Labour Shortage in the West Yorkshire Wool Textile Industry, 1945–1980

After the Second World War, the wool textile industry faced a significant labour shortage as its traditional workers escaped the poor wages and conditions of wool mills for better-paying, cleaner jobs. Three broad solutions to this crisis were adopted: the employment of immigrants, mainly from the Indian Subcontinent and Eastern Europe, the re-formatting and promotion of apprenticeships and the recruitment work undertaken by the Wool Industry Training Board. Of these solutions, employing immigrants was by far the most successful in bringing workers into the industry, while the latter two were resounding failures. In prioritising the recruitment of young, white, British men, the industry, trade unions and government missed a key opportunity to train immigrants and women to take the places of the skilled workers they so desperately sought.     

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.     

Defenders of the state: the Irish Labour Party,coalitionism and revisionism, 1969–77

Irish Labour Party politics underwent a significant transformation during the period 1969–77. During these years, the party moved from a position of opposition to coalition and apparent support for socialist politics to involvement in a coalition government with Fine Gael and an abandonment of its previously stated goal, the thirty-two-county socialist republic. This paper locates the main factor behind this shift in Labour’s attachment to the institutions of the Republic of Ireland state. As that state was threatened by the crisis in Northern Ireland from 1969 onwards, so the Labour Party was compelled to shift ground politically and move towards agencies that could offer stability. This led to permanent shifts in Labour policy and strategy.