Social Careers Across Imperial Spaces: An Empire Family in the Dutch-British World, 1811-1933

Here the object biography of a scale model of an old Dutch colonial sugar factory directs us to the history of an extended family, and demonstrates the connectedness of people and identities across and within European imperial spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study shows how people in colonial Indonesia became ‘Dutch’ through their social networks and cultural capital (for instance a European education). They even came to belong to the colonial and national Dutch elites while, because of their descent, also belonging to the British colonial and national elites. These intertwined Dutch and British imperial spaces formed people’s identities and status: the family discussed here became an important trans-imperial patrician family with a broad imperial ‘spatial imagination’, diverse identities and social circles. It was mostly women who played important roles in these transnational processes— roles indeed that they played well into the early twentieth century when colonial empires ceased to exist and the nation-state became the ‘natural’ social and political form of the modern world, obscuring these transnational processes.     

Empire and Globalisation: from ‘High Imperialism’ to Decolonisation

Reviewing the expansion and ultimate demise of the British and French empires, this article takes a long view of globalisation as an integral part of Europe's recent imperial past. The authors’ argument is that these empires were not simply a global phenomenon. Rather, the processes that built and destroyed them were more actively ‘globalising’. In this context, they argue that the rise and fall of the two pre-eminent overseas empires had several globalising effects. These globalising effects include distinct patterns of migration and communication, critical shifts in the movement of goods and capital, new forms of transnational connection, changing conceptualisations of community and individual rights, and discrete forms of violence and conflict that outlasted the ‘formal’ end of empires.     

From ‘Relief’ to ‘Justice and Protection’: The Maintenance of Deserted Wives,British Masculinity and Imperial Citizenship, 1870–1920

In the early twentieth century, local British poor law guardians’ concerns with the maintenance of deserted and neglected families were transformed into imperial, and later transnational, policy promoting justice for abandoned wives and children. Both local court cases concerning maintenance and policy debates at the national and imperial levels reveal the ways in which a breadwinner model of masculinity shaped maintenance policy and practice. Although the maintenance problem was framed differently by local welfare providers and imperial heads of state, concerns about welfare costs and human rights intersected in the figure of the irresponsible male citizen, who challenged the dominant model of British/imperial masculinity by refusing to maintain his wife.     

Ornamentalism,Empire and Race: Indigenous Leaders and Honours in Australia and New Zealand

The imperial honours system, David Cannadine has argued, was a means for binding together ‘the British proconsular elite’ and ‘indigenous colonial elites’ throughout the settler colonies and dominions of the British Empire (Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2002). Yet in settler colonies like Australia and New Zealand indigenous populations were marginalised and often disregarded, and it was local white elites who became knights of St Michael and St George, the Bath and the British Empire. Focusing on Australia and New Zealand, this article explores the complex relationships Aboriginal and Māori leaders have had with honours during the twentieth century. Building upon Cannadine's analysis, I examine the ways in which indigenous leaders navigated the political complexities involved in the offer of an honour, and how their acceptance of awards was received by others, shedding light on how honours systems intersected with post-war struggles for indigenous rights in the former dominions.     

Lamas,Empresses and Tea: Early Twentieth-Century Sino-British Encounters in Eastern Tibet

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Tibetan plateau was a zone of intense imperial contact—and competition—between British India and Qing China. Even before the 1904 Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa, Indian rupees had become the primary currency of commercial exchange across the plateau, and British explorers had gathered detailed knowledge of both the presumed natural resource bounty of eastern Tibet and the lucrative border tea trade traversing it. This article explores models manifested by these interactions between British and Qing officials, merchants and explorers in the Kham region of ethnographic Tibet and the role empires played in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global spread of Euro-American norms. Although Sichuan officials directly engaged with administering Kham shared a common perception of Khampa society with their British counterparts, they also recognised the encroachment of Indian rupees and British explorers as challenges to Qing authority, if not a prologue to territorial expansion paralleling the contemporaneous scramble for concessions in coastal China. Beginning with the establishment of the Zongli Yamen in 1861, close Sino-British interaction along two tracks, British ‘lessons’ in statecraft and diplomacy in the imperial capital Beijing and commercial and political actions in the imperial borderland of Kham, provided models for Qing assertion of exclusive authority on the plateau. Two globalising norms inflected in these British models—territoriality and sovereignty—fostered transformative policies in the borderland during the first decade of the twentieth century. Implemented by Sichuan officials, these policies sought to undermine Lhasa's local challenge to Chinese authority via monasteries, thereby legitimising appeal to international law to repel regional challenges from both British India and Russia. This article analyses in depth two examples of these policies in action: a silver coin modelled on the Empress Victoria Indian rupee and a monopoly tea company partly modelled on British Indian tea firms and the Indian Tea Association. Both contributed to weakening the political, social and economic power projected into Kham by British India and Lhasa. The adaptation of these models in Qing policies fostered by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Sino-British encounter in Kham reveals the conduits through which Euro-American norms of authority were shared, and demonstrates their power to transform relations in the interstices of global power, where empires met empires and states met states.     

Infective Economies: Empire,Panic and the Business of Disease

The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, the paper suggests that an analysis of a ‘local’ epidemic episode and its wider reverberations provides a new perspective on the often heated debates during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the meaning and scope of empire in relation to new communication networks. The paper shows how expanding global networks were construed alternatively as sustaining and jeopardising imperial power. The bubonic plague in Hong Kong—a hub of ‘free trade’ in East Asia—and the panicked reactions elicited by the disease's diffusion westwards revealed the economic priorities that informed colonial public health concerns as well as the challenges posed to laissez-faire economic policy and ‘free trade’ by the expanding influence of capital in the ‘New Imperialism’. In so doing, the paper suggests that contemporary preoccupations with ‘globalisation’, ‘biosecurity’ and ‘emerging diseases’ have antecedents that lie beyond the Second World War and the interwar period in a late-nineteenth-century imperial biopolitics.     

Imperial Rome and Britain's Language of Empire 1600–1837

Britain's pre-Victorian overseas expansion stimulated Roman comparisons. But imperial Rome was a warning as much as an inspiration to future empires, a harsh and uncomfortable model for Britain as a former Roman colony. Roman dignity was claimed for British monarchs and achievements by Dryden and others. But there were mixed feelings about identifying expanding Britain as a second Roman Empire. In the eighteenth century the British freedom-fighter Caractacus, defeated by the Romans, appealed far more to popular taste than Virgil's Aeneas or the Emperor Augustus. Sustained unease about imperial Rome, going right back to Tacitus, anticipated the liberal critique of imperialism of some Victorian and Edwardian commentators.     

Imperial Rome and Britain's Language of Empire 1600–1837

Britain's pre-Victorian overseas expansion stimulated Roman comparisons. But imperial Rome was a warning as much as an inspiration to future empires, a harsh and uncomfortable model for Britain as a former Roman colony. Roman dignity was claimed for British monarchs and achievements by Dryden and others. But there were mixed feelings about identifying expanding Britain as a second Roman Empire. In the eighteenth century the British freedom-fighter Caractacus, defeated by the Romans, appealed far more to popular taste than Virgil's Aeneas or the Emperor Augustus. Sustained unease about imperial Rome, going right back to Tacitus, anticipated the liberal critique of imperialism of some Victorian and Edwardian commentators.     

The Empire Meets the New Deal: Interwar Encounters in Conservation and Regional Planning

British imperial and American experiences in conservation and planning are providing fresh interdisciplinary challenges for university teaching and research. The Roosevelt administration's ‘New Deal’ included government‐sponsored interventions in soil erosion and water management and sophisticated regional development agendas. Reviewing samples of the latter areas of concern, this article explores the proposition that, although the British Empire was scarcely bereft of comparable interwar programmes and was becoming somewhat preoccupied with centrifugal tendencies, persistent porosity, exhausting struggles with postwar reconstruction, and comprehensive economic depression, New Deal evangelism was in fact variously anticipated, harnessed, challenged and ignored. A discussion of widely separated national and regional examples locates a layered interplay between uneven imperial and US pulsations, independent local manoeuvres, and critical inputs from key individual agents. The most important filters included the presence of comparatively robust bureaucratic infrastructures and the cultivation of international relationships by scientists and technologists. Encounters with convergent revisionism suggest cautionary leads for students, researchers and teachers alike. Reconstructions of selected contexts underline the presence of familiar posturing, opportunism, and astute patriotic deployment during the emergence of modern styles of globalization.     

Introduction: Religion and Empire,an Historiographical Perspective*

The relations between empires and Christianity have been the subject of considerable historiographical attention and it is the object of this paper to review the major issues in this recent literature to provide a context for the specialised papers which follow. Major issues on which discussion is focussed include the extent to which missionaries can be said to be agents of empire, the significance of missionary critique of imperial practice and the extent to which missionary activity was a form of “cultural imperialism.” Examples are chosen chiefly from the British Empire but there is also some comparative material drawn from the history of the Roman, Spanish, and French empires.     

Biography and the Making of Transnational Imperialism: Karl Gützlaff on the China Coast, 1831–1851

This essay challenges the ‘methodological territorialism’ and ‘methodological nationalism’ prevalent in recent studies of imperial biographies, examining the role of the German Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1801–1851) in establishing a transnational form of free-trade imperialism in China. A native of Prussia and a missionary by training, Gützlaff was first posted in the Netherlands East Indies before associating himself with British interests on the China coast. However, his loyalty was not limited to one imperialist power. In the 1840s, Gützlaff promoted German trade with China, and at certain points of time he also supported American as well as Scandinavian interests. In addition to making a name for himself as a cultural broker and promoter of free trade and diplomatic representation, he also became involved with various forms of imperialism, from the more fluid commercial variant to the more formalised power structures of territorial rule. The case of Gützlaff therefore lends itself to a reflection about the permeable and shifting boundaries of empires. Moreover, it calls for a reassessment of German imperialism in the period before 1871, showing how Germany's involvement with ‘Western’ global expansion was palpable and not merely confined to the realm of colonial fantasy.     

‘More Hateful because of its Hypocrisy’: Indians,Britain and Canadian Law in the Komagata Maru Incident of 1914

Recent remembrance and memorialisation of the Komagata Maru incident of 1914 has neglected the global and imperial implications of the incident, as well as the role that direct actions by the Indian passengers and Indians in Vancouver took against Canada’s discriminatory law. While the legal loss the passengers suffered could be regarded as simply tragic, the implications for the British Empire behind the Komagata Maru incident are more complex. More than just a legal battle between would-be Indian migrants and the Vancouver immigration authorities, the incident is a highly visible clash of two different understandings of the British imperial legal system. In contrast to any view that imperial harmony and the rights of all its subjects should supersede local concerns within the empire, Canadian immigration and legal officials instead viewed their rights as a self-governing dominion to make and pass their own laws (particularly around areas of racial desirability) as more important than issues of imperial membership, loyalty or harmony. The British government’s decision, in turn, not to contradict Canada’s eventual ruling against the Komagata Maru passengers and the decision to deport them, exposed the legal hierarchies of supposed imperial belonging, citizenship and ‘British liberty’ in the empire at a critical moment in the early twentieth century. What the incident highlighted, then, was an increasing legal distinction between settler colonies and colonies of exploitation within the empire.     

A jurisprudence of power: Martial law and the Ceylon controversy of 1848–51

The English East India Company has long been regarded as a ‘mere merchant’ that turned into a sovereign only with its eighteenth-century territorial acquisitions in India. Focusing on the first decades of Company rule at St Helena, this article argues instead that the late seventeenth-century Company aspired to become a polity in itself: a self-sustaining global system built upon sound civic institutions and informed by a coherent if composite political ideology. In the end, the Company's early history at St Helena demands a flexible understanding both of the boundaries of the British ‘Atlantic world’ and of the various kinds of political communities beyond the national state instrumental in fashioning early modern empires. Moreover, such a political and intellectual approach to the early Company confounds the trade-to-empire narrative that has long defined its history, insisting on deeper and more complex roots for the ‘Company-State’ and thus for British Empire in India.     

Protection,Federation and Union: The Global Impact of the McKinley Tariff upon the British Empire, 1890–94

This article takes a global historical approach to American protectionism and the British imperial federation movement of the late nineteenth century, showing how US tariff policy was intimately intertwined with the political and economic policies of the British empire of free trade. This article argues that the 1890 McKinley Tariff's policies helped call into question Britain's liberal, free trade, global empire by drumming up support for an imperial, protectionist, preferential Greater Britain. The tariff also speeded up the demand and development of more efficient transportation and communications—technological developments that made imperial federation all the more viable—within the British Empire. This article is thus a global history of the McKinley Tariff's impact upon the British Empire, as well as a study of the tariff's effect upon the history of modern globalisation.     

The Limits of the Shanghai Bridgehead: Understanding British Intervention in the Taiping Rebellion 1860–62

This article discusses the rationale behind British intervention in the Taiping civil war in China and the episode’s wider significance for understanding nineteenth-century British imperial expansion. I argue that the most productive way to understand the shape of the limited British intervention in the war is through analysing the relative strength of distinct bridgeheads of British interest in China. British interests in Shanghai grew rapidly in the Taiping period and helped to draw in intervention against the Taiping armies when they attacked the port in 1860 and 1862. The strict limitation of this intervention, which did not result in any imperial expansion in China, was a result of the consistent underperformance of the wider British trade with China. Without a growth in this trade, the expense of an extensive intervention and its potential consequences could not be justified. The episode suggests that analyses of local conditions and the strength of local ties to metropolitan resources are important for understanding the wider pattern of British imperial expansion.     

(Re)Hibernicising Wilde? A genetic analysis of The Picture of Dorian Gray

The controversy surrounding the integrity and originality of Harvard University Press’s unexpurgated version of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in 2011 has underlined the timeliness and necessity of further genetic critique of Wilde’s only novel and attendant ephemera. By undertaking a genetic reading of the three versions of this text now available to us, this article examines how Wilde’s letters, poetry, lectures and reviews that precede the novel reveal an intensification of Wilde’s nationalism and anti-imperialism in the run-up to its publication. In particular, the article uncovers the differing impact of the Parnell scandal and the Land Wars on the different versions of the novel and also reads the abject scenes of imperial predation set in the London docks as Wilde’s meditation on Ireland’s contested colonial status within the UK and the global system of exploitation driving “The Great Game” of Empire per se.     

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.     

Empire Day in Africa: Patriotic Colonial Childhood,Imperial Spectacle and Nationalism in Nigeria, 1905–60

Anyone born or raised in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, after 1960 would remember Children’s Day, observed every 27 May. However, few knew that it started as Empire Day in the first decade of the twentieth century—fewer are aware that it was a significant symbol of imperial domination, decolonised from the late 1950s to align with postcolonial ideals of self-determination and nation-building. African historical research has examined the sites and symbols (such as western biomedicine and education, police and prison, and indirect rule) through which British imperialism established and maintained itself in Africa. However, little is known about Empire Day, an invented tradition of ritualistic yearly veneration of the glory of the British Empire, which was first celebrated in Britain in 1904 and was immediately introduced to the African colonies. In this article, I examine the story of Empire Day as a significant colonial spectacle and performance of imperial authority in Nigeria, and how it assumed new meanings and functions among diverse groups of Nigerian children and adults. Empire Day, more than any other commemoration, placed children at the centre of imperialism and recognised them as a vital element in the sustenance of an imagined citizenship of the British Empire.