A Technocratic Vision of Empire: Lord Montagu and the Origins of British Air Power

This article advances the existing literature on British imperial aeronautics by explaining how Lord John Montagu’s extensive collaboration with military and government officials during the first decades of powered flight expanded the global distribution of the air forces and anticipated their important later role in facilitating international communication and security. In reconsidering problems of conquest and governance through an aeronautical perspective, Montagu strengthened critical junctures between British civil and military affairs, while his innovative employment of the new technology also complicated divisions between the metropolis and periphery in ways that would intensify the destructiveness of modern warfare across the planet.     

Democratisation and the British Empire

ABSTRACT

This article responds to the statistically established finding in democratisation studies that British rule seems to have been good for the survival of democracy in its former empire, and that the longer a nation spent under British rule, the likelier it is to have sustained democracy since independence. This is a finding which puzzles political scientists because they think of democracy and empire as opposites. The article considers the uses made of democratic innovation by the British and the responses anti-colonial nationalists made to the offer to ‘lead them to democracy’. It places democracy and empire in a different, more complex relationship. It also considers the contribution of anti-colonial protest to the working of democracy.     

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.     

Emancipation and captivity in the British Empire

ABSTRACT

The end of colonial slavery in the British empire, in 1834, was one of the landmark achievements of British imperial liberalism. Emancipation policies, however, were designed to recapture emancipated people; the end of slavery was the beginning of a new kind of captivity to global capitalism and the discipline of wage labour.     

Women and War in the British Empire

This provocation stimulates reflection on the Eurocentricity of Second World War histories and reflects on how new work can extend the boundaries of the subjects of the war. It argues that women in the British Empire were affected by the war in ways which have, thus far, been under-appreciated.