Colonial Australia,the 1887 Colonial Conference,and the Struggle for Imperial Unity

ABSTRACT

For historians interested in the settler colonial world, one of Professor John Darwin’s most important interventions has been to argue for the reintegration of the dominions into the wider history of the British empire. In re-engaging with the history of Britain’s white settler colonies in North America, Australasia, and South Africa, Darwin’s work has sought to emphasize the place of the dominions in relation to the rise and fall of the British world system, as well as their value as vantage points from which to consider imperial and global history more generally. In this regard, Darwin’s systemic approach has encouraged a more dynamic conception of ‘British world’ history – one deeply embedded in a series of overlapping imperial, regional, and international contexts. This article focuses on a particular moment in imperial history where some of the internal dynamics of the late-Victorian British world system, and the changing place of the settler colonies within it, were brought into sharp relief: the 1887 Colonial Conference. It argues that we might look to the conference as a valuable window onto the impact of Anglo-Australian relations upon the wider struggle for imperial unity in the 1880s.     

Imperial Mobility: The Colonial Worlds of Sir Anthony and Lady Jeanie Musgrave

Mobility—of people, products, and capital—is a common trope of the contemporary globalized world. Yet, mobility is not only a current phenomenon, but has an integral role in the constitution of past empires. In particular, the governance of empire requires the mobility of administrators and their families: people who, in the service of empire, travel between metropole and periphery, and even more typically, in the multiple circuits between peripheries. The life of Sir Anthony Musgrave, a colonial administrator who served in posts in the Caribbean, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, exemplifies the movement which empire demands. In their travels around the British world of the late nineteenth century, the Musgraves—Sir Anthony, his American-born wife Lady Jeanie, and their three sons—engaged with empire in ways both physical and conceptual. In this essay, I explore how the Musgraves’ mobility contributed to a sense of overlapping colonial worlds that were supported and challenged by the rise of communication and transport technologies, the flows of international labor, and the competing demands of national and imperial identities.     

Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925

This paper considers the translation of domestic discourses over imperial space as middle-class British women established homes in India from 1886 to 1925. Unlike studies of imperial domesticity that delineate separate spheres of home and empire, I consider the exercise of imperial power on a domestic scale, by examining advice given in household guides on managing servants and raising British children in India. Rather than view the household merely as confining, I also explore the advice given to British women regarding travel outside their homes in India. The domestic roles of British women reproduced imperial power relations on a household scale, and the political significance of imperial domesticity extended beyond the boundaries of the home.     

Canada and the British Empire

Britain attempted to create an informal empire in the Middle East and used the British Middle East Office to sponsor development work precisely to attain a significant influence in the region, one that would salvage a fair share of rapidly declining imperial power. Environmental initiatives, many of them focusing on forestry, composed a key element of this programme. However an informal empire did not ensue. This led the Foreign Office, and many historians, to overlook the importance of the BMEO. This article explores how the environmental reforms proposed by British advisers radically changed land use in the Middle East between 1946 and 1970, and left behind a remarkable legacy of conservation.     

Written Differently: A Survey of Commonwealth Constitutional History in the Age of Decolonisation

ABSTRACT

This article provides a survey and definition of the field of Commonwealth constitutional history since 1918, especially during and after global decolonisation. It asks what is Commonwealth constitutional history and how it differs from its English and Imperial counterparts. The article puts forward a working definition of Commonwealth constitutional history and introduces key and diverse writers who illustrate the range and potential of this history. The article provides an historiography and survey of constitutional history in the Pre-Commonwealth and Post-war Commonwealth periods while also assessing the opportunities of Post-British Commonwealth constitutional history. The objective of this article is to show how Commonwealth constitutional history can contribute to the historical study of state power and to see its worth to other disciplines and fields of history. Commonwealth constitutional history is a necessity to examine the politics, power and consequences of the British empire during the long age of decolonisation.     

英属北美殖民地法律的早期现代化

关于英属北美殖民地社会经济属何种性质的讨论,涉及到对当时法律制度的历史地位进行评价的问题,美国学术界在这些方面至今还存在很多争议。从美国学者的学术交锋来看,尽管英属北美殖民地是否已进入资本主义发展阶段仍有待商榷,但当时市场经济的扩张确实已达到了一定的程度,从而使殖民地的法律制度出现了早期现代化的趋势,主要表现为陪审团在民事审判中的初步式微、从事实性答辩向法律性答辩的转变、普通法令状制度的逐步健全、专业律师队伍的出现和仲裁的正规化或边缘化。因此,英属北美殖民地法律在美国法律史上占有重要地位,殖民地时期绝不是美国法律的“黑暗时代”,当然也不可和19世纪混为一谈。     

‘Dominion over palm and pine’: the British Empire forestry conferences, 1920–1947

During the first half of the twentieth century British imperialists invested ardent hopes in the emergence of a self-sufficient, competitive Empire. World War 1 focused some of those aspirations on the progressive management of forest resources, and in 1920 the UK launched a series of British Empire Forestry Conferences in pursuit of that aim. An uneven, intermittent exchange attempted to address the complexities of imperfectly understood cultural, economic, environmental, political, scientific, social and technical change, the pressure of extra-imperial influences, and the independent trajectories of ambitious settler Dominions. The Depression and World War 2 also entered the dynamic, severely testing the foresters' achievements and their resolve. From today's perspective the main products are a small window on the antecedents of modern forestry and the nucleus of a promising archive for interdisciplinary teaching and research.     

Wandering scholars? Academic mobility and the British World, 1850–1940

At the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, held in London in 1903, delegates from across the universities of Britain's settler empire professed the existence of a British academic community, defined not by location, but by shared culture, shared values and shared ethnicity. This article examines the extent to which these claims reflected actual patterns of academic mobility in the settler empire between 1850 and 1940. By mapping the careers of the 350 professors who served at the Universities of Sydney, Toronto, and Manchester during this period, it concludes that, between 1900 and 1930 especially, there existed a distinctly British academic world within which scholars moved frequently along different migratory axes. Though not as united, extensive and uncomplicated as that in which the 1903 Conference delegates believed, this world nonetheless shared more in common with their vision of an expansive British academic community than it did with the image of an unconnected and isolated periphery that has characterised portrayals by subsequent university historians.     

Spectres of Pan-Islam: Methodological Nationalism and British Imperial Policy after the First World War

In the aftermath of the First World War, British officials were forced to contend with a threat that seemed to undermine their empire from India to Egypt. The anti-colonial revolts that spread across the world in this moment were caused by many factors from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to far more local concerns. However, many British officials imagined these contemporaneous revolts to be caused by a pan-Islamic conspiracy. The threat of pan-Islam was inflated in the minds of these officials in large part because it fundamentally contradicted their conception of how politics should be ordered on a global scale. This article suggests that the spectre of pan-Islam helped to crystallise a methodological nationalism in imperial policies over Muslim populations. The amorphous spatiality of pan-Islam redoubled a growing commitment to bounded national spaces as a natural unit of political activity. To those officials obsessed with pan-Islam, it was so frightening precisely because it questioned the spatial paradigm through which they understood the world. Other officials saw pan-Islam as a minor nuisance, because they believe that such transnational politics could not possibly survive in a world inherently ordered into contiguous nations. The threat of pan-Islam helped to push both sets of officials into a methodological nationalism, but some saw nationalism as inevitable while others feared that Islam was a compelling threat to a European-dominated inter-national order.     

William Ogilvie,the Klondike Borderlands and the Making of the Canadian West

This article focuses on William Ogilvie, the Canadian Dominions Surveyor and Commissioner of the Yukon during one of the most formative periods in Canadian history—the opening of the Yukon Territories during the Klondike Gold Rush. By the mid-1890s, Canadian and American miners flooded the Yukon–Alaska border in search of gold. The mass migration of American miners created anxieties among Canadian officials who believed Americans would forcibly annex the Yukon Territories. In light of this, Ogilvie was tasked with clarifying the contested boundary line and establishing economic links across the Atlantic to Great Britain in order to secure the Canadian boundary and maintain Canadian authority on the frontier. In 1898, Ogilvie left for Great Britain to tie Canada more closely to the British Empire and, effectively, sell the Yukon to potential British investors. This article thus speaks to issues in the North American borderlands and Atlantic history.     

Subjects,citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

This article focuses on the role of ethnic inclusions and exclusions in administering citizenship and nationality within the British and the Habsburg Empires. The analysis discerns three ways of dealing with ethnically heterogenous populations. One follows the nation-state model and aims for internal ethnic homogeneity and legal equality. This model coined developments in Canada and Hungary. The second obeys an imperialistic pattern and implements legal discrimination between different ethnic groups. It played a decisive role in East Africa and in Bosnia to a certain degree. The third model follows a statist logic and enforces either supra-ethnic neutrality or a politics of recognition. It was most influential in Austria and India. In the British as well as in the Habsburg context ethnic differences gained significance around 1900. This ethnicising of law and administrative practice produced different results, though, in both cases, mainly due to the empires' divergent political structures. Whereas within the Habsburg Empire the three models were juxtaposed, British law and administration came to be dominated by the imperialistic pattern of ethnic discrimination against ‘non-white’ subjects. Thus, the customary distinction between a politically inclusive nationalism in Western Europe and an ethnically exclusive one in the continent's Eastern half – sometimes linked with the difference between ius soli and ius sanguinis – cannot be upheld.     

Ireland in the imperial imagination: British nationalism and the Anglo-Irish Treaty

ABSTRACT

The signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921 was a watershed moment in modern Irish history. In addition to copper-fastening the partition of the island, the agreement catalysed the bifurcation of revolutionary Sinn Féin and set in train the processes that culminated, ultimately, in the outbreak of a bitter Civil War the following June. The events that led to the Treaty and the debates on it in Dáil Éireann have received extensive treatment from historians. However, scholars have paid far less attention to the impact of the Treaty on British politics; in particular, they have neglected to explore how the concession of limited Irish self-government impacted Britain’s national self-image at a time of crucial imperial adjustment following the Great War. This article will examine the range of arguments proffered for and against the Treaty in the House of Commons and the House of Lords and suggest that Parliamentary opposition to the settlement was underpinned by a sense of imperial-national feeling, one guided by an attitude of conscious superiority to non-British elements that can be understood productively as a form of British nationalism.     

Global Markets, Local Practice: Ottoman-period Clay Pipes and Smoking Paraphernalia from the Red Sea Shipwreck at Sadana Island, Egypt

Shipwreck archaeology provides unique evidence for trade, commercial relationships, and the day-to-day existence of occupational communities defined by residence and employment within the industrial space aboard a ship. These concerns are addressed particularly well by finds of utilitarian items such as a small assemblage of 21 clay pipes and three other smoking-related artifacts recently excavated from the ca. 1765 Sadana Island ship which sank at anchor while loaded with coffee, porcelain, qulal, and other goods. Analysis of the assemblage specifically contributes to questions of chronology and typology and presents new evidence for regionalism, style, and the impact of far-reaching trade routes on markets with a global perspective.     

Notes on the Zionist passage to India,or: The analogical imagination and its boundaries

This article provides an outline of an alternative narrative of the Zionist road to statehood by reading the parallel histories of partition and state-making in the British Raj in India and Mandatory Palestine/Israel in tandem. After reviewing some of the recent scholarship on the subject, the article demonstrates how the reconstruction of an analogical prism among the historical actors can contribute to the understanding of the roots of partition politics transnationally. Lastly, it points at the way in which the analogical perspective became part and parcel of the bureaucracy and legislation developed post-partition by the new states.     

Leibniz,Locke, and the Early Modern Controversy over Legal Maxims

This article investigates the context of a side line in Leibniz's critique of Locke on maxims. In an enigmatic and little-explored remark, Leibniz objects that Locke has overlooked some legal maxims that fulfil the function of ‘constituting the law’. I propose to read this remark against the background of the divergence between conceptions of legal maxims in the common law tradition and conceptions of legal maxims in the Roman law tradition. In a few remarks, Locke seems to echo the common law emphasis on customs and conventions expressed by legal maxims. According to such a conception, reason would mainly fulfil the function of subsuming particular norms under more general conventional norms. By contrast, Leibniz uses the Roman law idea that some ‘rules of law’ express demands of natural reason and, thereby, express principles constitutive of natural law. This is why he proposes to reform vague and confused ‘brocards’ used by jurists in order to identify sound maxims that provide a natural-law foundation for legal institutions.     

A Vast Inland Empire and the Last Great West: remaking society, space and environment in early British Columbia

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new order was imposed on the land and inhabitants of present-day interior British Columbia. From one perspective this was a story of human progress and improvement – the advance of colonizing Europeans into lands that they considered underutilized and unproductive and that they sought, often successfully, to bring within the growing orbit of global trade and world capitalism. Yet for many people and creatures the story of resettlement was far from a story of progress. In relatively short order – less than a century – the grasslands of interior British Columbia were swept and transformed by many of the most powerful currents of western modernity. The results of this transformation were uneven and often deeply inequitable. By the late nineteenth century native peoples had been dispossessed and struggled to survive on small resource-poor Indian Reserves; a few corporate and family-owned cattle ranches controlled the best range leaving small-scale immigrant ranchers with more or less marginal land; and many types of grassland had been heavily overgrazed. This paper explores these darker sides of European resettlement in present-day interior British Columbia by emphasizing the role of ranching in colonial resettlement, by describing the stratified rural society that ranching, in part, produced, and by revealing the different ways that cattle and ranches interacted with natural and economic processes to remake an environment.     

东魏北齐史官制度与官修史书——再论史馆修史始于北齐

东魏迁都邺城,学术文化中心转移,北魏太和以来积累的文明成果萃集邺下,为东魏北齐史官制度的发展与《魏书》编纂提供了良好条件,并由此形成了史馆修史与大臣监修制度。大臣监修与史馆修史二者一体,史馆是一专门修史机构,似在宫禁集书省与起居省内,已不同于北魏秘书省之史阁。大臣监修改变了北魏以来秘书监、丞典领国史的传统,入馆修史加兼著作,脱离了秘书著作系统。著作从秘书省游离出来,与集注起居形成更加密切的关系。东魏北齐沿承北魏,置集书省和起居省,北魏以守尚书典注起居,东魏北齐以散骑常侍等侍官监领或撰修起居注。史馆修史与起居集注,造就了《魏书》、《齐书》、《齐纪》等史书。东魏北齐史官制度变化的依据为礼制的修订,唐代礼多因循北齐,故其史馆修史制度亦上承北齐。     

Collectivity,Hierarchy and Context: The Theoretical Framework for the Aggregation Problem

ABSTRACT

Ottoman historians have been severely limited by the availability and quality of primary sources from which historical prices can be compiled. This article stresses the potential of inheritance inventories for expanding the field of Ottoman price history and provides a detailed examination of the quality of the valuations in these sources. The results strongly suggest that inventory valuations are generally consistent and were closely related to the conventional prices of the time. Building upon these findings, it is reasonable to assume that the prices contained in Ottoman inheritance inventories can be reliably employed for historical research.     

Bringing the feudal law back home: social practice and the law of fiefs in Italy and Provence (1100–1250)

ABSTRACT

The Libri feudorum is a composite law book containing the customary laws of fiefs held in Lombardy which were codified in 1100–1250. Its function in shaping a late medieval ‘feudal vocabulary’ and, ultimately, modern models of feudalism was highlighted by Susan Reynolds and lies at the core of her anti-feudalism paradigm. This paper questions the disjuncture between social practice and learned law that underlies the paradigm, by analysing the context and making of the Libri feudorum and of legal writings associated with it – by Pillius de Medicina, Iacobus de Ardizone and Jean Blanc. By showing how practice could shape legal tools used by learned lawyers to frame fiefs and by reassessing the influence of the Libri feudorum on practice, the paper challenges the idea that fiefs were the outcome of professional or academic law and unveils aspects of the practical nature and intellectual dimension of lawyerly writing.