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.     

Imperialist and Nationalist Voices in the Struggle for Egyptian independence, 1919–22

This article explores the role of both pro-nationalist and pro-imperialist voices in Egypt and Britain during the Egyptian revolution of 1919. In doing so, it criticises Edward Said's assumption that the ‘Orientalist’ voice of the British imperialists was integral and unchallenged by demonstrating the extent to which left-wing MPs in the House of Commons were able to air the views of the Egyptian nationalists in the British political scene. It investigates the manner in which imperialist rhetoric, in response to this challenge, shifted from race-based to culture-based justifications for the continued subjection of Egyptians, arguing that figures connected to the British protectorate attempted to exploit the limited knowledge of Egypt within the British parliament to this end. Nevertheless, it will also show the extent to which attempts to inculcate colonial ideologies within Egypt itself proved futile for the British.     

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.     

In Search of the Good Life: Life‐History of a Kenyan Indian Settler. A Sartrean Approach to Biography and History

This article recounts how a young Shi’a Muslim Indian born in north‐west India migrated to Kenya in the early twentieth century in the context of the evolving trade linking the two continents, and rose to become a successful merchant and respected member of the community. It portrays the struggles that he undertook with fellow Kenyan Indians against British colonial policies of racial discrimination and political marginalization, and shows some of the unintended consequences of these actions for the group in the post‐colonial period. Through the application of Jean‐Paul’s Sartre’s concepts of project, situation, seriality and dialectical totalization, the article attempts to capture some of the historical processes that took place during the period at four interconnected levels: individual; communal; regional; and global.     

Claims to protection: the rise and fall of feminist abolitionism in the League of Nations' Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936

This article examines the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Trafficking of Women and Children (CTW) to assess the impact of international feminists on the interwar anti-sex trafficking movement. It argues that women who were firmly embedded in the transnational and international women's rights movement built a coalition on the CTW to ensure the prominence of the feminist abolitionist position of sex trafficking in the 1920s. This position was defined by calls for equal standards of morality between the sexes, resistance to laws that treated prostitutes as a group and infringed on their human rights, and unwavering demands for the abolition of state-regulated prostitution. Changes in the personnel and bureaucratic structure of the CTW and the rising tide of nationalism served to undermine the feminist abolitionists' position in the League in the 1930s.     

The Wire: Progress,Paradox, and Disaster in the Strategic Networking of China, 1881–1901

This study of the introduction of telegraphy to China in the late-nineteenth century tells three interrelated stories: China’s pursuit of telegraphic sovereignty with its strategic networking of the empire in the period 1881–99; the functioning of China’s hybrid express courier-telegraphic communications infrastructure; and the international communications crisis during the Boxer Uprising and the “Siege of the Legations” in 1900. The material reality of two inter-connected networks—the privately owned Imperial Telegraph Administration network and the government-run telegraph network—allowed Qing-era Beijing and its provincial governors to communicate with much greater speed. The materiality of these networks—how this new communications technology affected the practical realities of government communications, including the ease of lateral communications between provincial governors—is explored in the context of the communications crisis of 1900. In May and June of 1900 all telegraph lines to Beijing, and throughout much of North China, were cut or otherwise destroyed. While these blinded Western governments are no longer able to exchange telegrams with their Beijing-based envoys, the Qing express courier system continued to operate. Moreover, both the court and provincial officials quickly improvised ad hoc telegraphic communication protocols through the use of “transfer telegrams” (zhuandian) that relied on mounted express couriers between Beijing and those North China telegraph stations with working network connections. This assessment of real-time secret imperial communications between the Qing court and the provinces is based on the documentary register Suishou dengji (Records of [documents] at hand) maintained by communications managers in the Grand Council. China lost its telegraphic sovereignty in the capital region when Allied troops occupied the Beijing-Tianjin line of communications in the summer and fall of 1900. Moreover, Western dreams of laying, landing, and controlling submarine cables on the China coast were finally realized in North China by the end of 1900. The British, therefore, were able to add a critical section to their planned global network of secure telegraphic communications. China’s recognition of the Western and Japanese right of protecting the Beijing-Tianjin line of communications was codified in Article 9 of the Boxer Protocol of September 1901. These losses of China’s telegraphic sovereignty would not be completely reversed until after 1949.     

Gandhi and le gandhisme: Writing Indian Decolonisation and the Appropriation of Gandhi 1919–48

This article considers developments in French sport in the period 1998-2002, with particular emphasis on the social representation of performances by the nation's elite athletes in international competitions. It opens with the victory of the home side in the France 98 football World Cup and closes with the defeat of the national team in the 2002 edition of that same competition. The various attempts made both before and after France 98 to use sport as a means of promoting social inclusion and national solidarity, particularly as regards hitherto alienated young males from ethnic minorities (especially those of North African origin), are considered against this background. In order to place such developments in context, attention is also given to changes in patterns of sports participation and spending among the general French population. The article concludes with a brief survey of some recent intellectual critiques of this newfound national enthusiasm for sports.     

Searching for the Reluctant Hands: Obsession,Ambivalence and the Practice of Organising Involuntary Labour in Colonial Cuanza-Sul and Malange Districts,Angola, 1926–1945

In the 1930s, administrative control over the unruly hinterlands of Angola was established by the Portuguese colonisers, and officials at Lisbon's colonial ministry attempted to set up efficient mechanisms to force local populations to work. However, the experience and the attitudes of the administrators of the local posts—the chefes de posto—and of the small subdivisions were full of ambivalences and insecurities; their interaction with the African inhabitants of the respective areas and with the European settlers was characterised by improvisation. These attitudes of the local administrators, slowly changing up to and beyond the period of the Second World War, can be used as a window into administrative life in the field, and these attitudes had direct repercussions on the living conditions of rural Angolans. While this analysis is limited to subdivisions of the Angolan districts of Cuanza-Sul and Malange, it is intended to contribute to a broader picture of the effects the decisions of local administrators had, a picture applicable to other Portuguese colonies and to the lower parts of the hierarchy of other colonial empires.