‘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.     

Crown,communication and the colonial post: Stamps,the monarchy and the British empire

This article investigates some of the possibilities for imperial history of using philatelic evidence. It explores the ways in which the British empire as a working world system was underpinned by the Imperial Penny Postage and the production and use of postage stamps bearing the images of successive British monarchs and other British imperial iconography. With particular emphasis on the reign of George V, who took an especially close interest in philatelic matters, it charts and discusses some of the ways in which British, dominion, Indian and colonial postage stamp issues (including their commissioning, design and public reception) reflected political and aesthetic judgments at home and overseas, and expressed sometimes unexpected notions of appropriate imperial, dominion and colonial imagery. It provides some cultural evidence supporting the contention that the apogee of the British imperial system may have occurred sometime in the middle years of the twentieth century.     

Empire‐nation: national and imperial discourses in England

When the states of England and Scotland combined in 1707, conditions were created whereby English nationalism could merge into British nationalism. With the expansion of empire, English nationalism was expressed through imperial‐national discourses allowing English nationalists to claim non‐English space when articulating what might be best understood as an Anglo‐British nationalism. Accordingly, such discourses largely ‘hid’ what one might now understand as ‘English nationalism’ within a ‘British’ discourse of empire. The case of England illustrates that imperial discourses can become intimately bound up with the ‘national’ discourse of the nations at the core of the imperial structures. Accordingly, it is here argued that imperial and national discourse are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are able to feed into each other, affecting the manner in which ideas of the nation and empire are conceived and articulated.     

Free Trade Empire to Commonwealth of Nations: India,Britain and Imperial Preference, 1903–1932

This article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.     

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.     

The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji,M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Nationalism

This article examines Dadabhai Naoroji's and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree's contribution to politically partisan ideologies on Indian empire as London MPs and reform advocates late in the nineteenth century. Exploring politically nuanced, cultural definitions of racial difference, this article reveals how their participation in British parliamentary and press debate on Indian nationalism adhered to distinct liberal and conservative imperial political conceptions of race and governance during this period. Beyond an analysis of Naoroji and the Indian National Congress's relationship with British liberalism, this essay explores Bhownaggree's contribution to a sustained conservative imperial tradition. This article postulates that Edmund Burke's separation from a liberal imperial rationality and a British Tory critique of liberalism informed a nineteenth-century conservative governing justification in India predicated on conciliating organic national racial difference. As Naoroji's devotion, as a Liberal MP for Central Finsbury (1892–95), to a liberal civilising mission informed an advocacy of political self-governance in Britain and India, Bhownaggree's pursuit of female and technical education reform while Conservative MP for Bethnal Green N.E. (1895–1905) represented a conservative espousal of racial difference.     

Imperial Legacies and Internationalist Discourses: British Involvement in the United Nations Freedom from Hunger Campaign, 1960–70

Between 1960 and 1965, the British public raised almost seven million pounds to support the Freedom from Hunger Campaign (FFHC), a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization initiative that funded agricultural development projects across the underdeveloped world in an effort to ‘help the hungry to help themselves’. With the involvement of more than 100 countries and affiliated NGOs, the FFHC was by a considerable margin the largest humanitarian effort of its time, but it also forms part of a specifically British story about imperial benevolence and imperial decline. This article uses the British public's support for the campaign as a window onto the changing experience of British humanitarianism during an era of decolonisation. Did the British public's moral geography change as they lost their empire? Was there a role for the empire/commonwealth within the framework of an international campaign such as Freedom from Hunger? Which imperial legacies remained intact in the FFHC, which were adapted and which discarded?     

Boundary commissions as tools to safeguard British interests at the end of empire

Despite the many differences between Britain's decolonization of South Asia in 1947 and its withdrawal from the Palestine Mandate in 1948, there were important similarities in the British approach to boundary commissions in the two cases. As imperial interests evolved, boundary commissions proved flexible tools to preserve British prestige in the face of limited policy options. They were particularly useful in the years before and after World War II, when, with the empire facing potential disaster, its leaders sought to preserve its prestige in the eyes of domestic audiences and international allies. With its power fading, it was all the more important that the empire appear to be firmly in control. In particular, an examination of the Peel, Woodhead, and Radcliffe commissions shows that British leaders intended them to contribute to a façade of power. This article demonstrates that in retrospect they reveal the decline of imperial sway and the rise of nationalist influence.     

Empire and ethnicity†

ABSTRACT. Historians and social scientists have typically assumed a conflictual or exploitative relationship between empire and ethnicity. On the one hand, empire might be seen (as perhaps Ernest Gellner saw it in Nations and Nationalism) as a superstructure of coercion to which a group of ethnic units were subject. On the other (according to an influential view), empire fabricated ethnicities (tribes or castes) to divide and rule. This article suggests that both of these views are too crude. In the British case at least (and in the modern history of empire, no generalisation that excludes the British case has much value), ‘imperial ethnicity’ was a much more subtle phenomenon. It existed ‘at home’ as one element in a more complex identity. It was a powerful force in British settler societies, where an indigenous identity could not be imagined. And, perhaps surprisingly, it was deeply attractive to some colonial elites in Asia and Africa – at least for a time.     

Songs of Sisterhood: Feminist Political Practice between Empire and Internationalism 1910–20

This article seeks to understand how feminist thought and practice in the early twentieth century intersected with emergent movements against British imperialism. By tracing relations between Indian, Irish and British feminists, it delineates the diverse ways in which women, across imperial spaces, adopted emergent languages of internationalism and female fraternity to further their political ambitions. This article moves beyond the geographical boundaries of colony and metropole to uncover a much wider circulation of ideas, practices and solidarities amongst feminist networks in the early twentieth century. Collectively, the stories presented in this article convey multiple feminist political imaginaries in an era defined at once by imperial crisis and the rise of internationalism. They show that women's choices of political association in the autumn of empire were determined by their ideological affinity, political practice and social class rather than their country of origin or ethnic identity alone.     

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.     

Empires ancient and modern: strength,modernity and power in imperial ideology from the Liberal period to Fascism

This article examines the image of Empire developed in public discourse in Italy during the late Liberal period and Fascism by placing it in the context of representations of the British Empire, with which Italian imperial ambitions were compared. There is a continuity in seeing the British Empire as the expression of industrial and commercial modernity and its resultant strength, but what in the Liberal period was seen as an unparalleled superiority became under Fascism a supremacy acquired in a particular period but now exhibiting signs of decline, which Fascism should contest and surpass. Admiration of the British was mixed with disparagement: key figures expressed a competitive resentment towards Britain and its dominant international position, seeing it as the epitome of ‘modern’ imperial power against which Fascism was destined to be measured. In the 1930s signs of the British Empire's decline were sought, developing the idea in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that British domination would also rise and fall, and announcing the replacement of the ‘British order’, founded on commercial modernity and the strength of money and capital, by Fascism's new civilisation, with its authentic heritage of imperial romanità. This competitiveness towards Britain, which historiography has principally seen as a component of foreign policy (as was clear over Ethiopia), has additional significance when seen as an element of political culture that relates to the concept of the State. The autonomy and strength of the State were an important feature of Fascism's self-representation and of its legal culture, and in this light the possession of an empire came to be seen as an essential aspect of statehood and power.     

The Imperialism of Internment: Boer Prisoners of War in India and Civic Reconstruction in Southern Africa, 1899–1905

During the course of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, over 9,000 captured Boers were sent abroad to India as prisoners of war. Using hitherto unexamined sources, this article explores how, during their internment and repatriation, British officials and administrators across the empire collaborated in a concerted attempt to transform the imperial enemy into colonial collaborator. This involved a necessarily intercolonial effort to conduct a successful programme of ‘re-education’ capable of cultivating ‘white’ British virtues in preparing Boer POWs for their future rights and duties in reconstructing Southern Africa upon their repatriation. In so doing, the government of India and other colonial officials across the empire thus recapitulated their ideal of Britain’s imperial project in the Boer POW camps. Highlighting the intercoloniality of this process, India’s viceroy, Lord George Curzon, played as prominent a role as did the War Office, or South Africa’s soon-to-be pro-consul, Lord Alfred Milner. The microcosmic imperialism of Boer internment thus reveals a great deal about the nature and structure of power within the British Empire, and emphasises the value of an intercolonial or transcolonial perspective in examining the complex, global consequences of the Anglo-Boer War.     

明代蜀藩亲王墓葬的分布及相关问题试析

明代蜀藩墓葬自20世纪50年代以来发现颇多。结合对《明实录》等文献的梳理,推测潘家沟蜀王墓为明晚期的蜀端王墓,圹志碑未写蜀王谥号或与继任者"遽奏名封"一事有关。根据墓葬形制及蜀王文集、地方志等文献,凤凰山"蜀王妃"墓应是一座明早期的郡王级墓葬,墓主为崇庆王的可能性更大。结合部分亲王妃、郡王等略低等级墓葬的分布情况,可知蜀藩亲王墓可分为成都北郊、成都东南郊、黄龙溪、仁寿4个墓区。明初蜀王墓的选址经过较严格的规划;僖王使用了尚在郡王位时即已选定的墓址;此后的和王、定王选址较分散,距成都较远;怀王之后均相对集中葬于成都东南郊,或有政令因素的影响。     

Special Days of Worship and National Religion in the Australian Colonies, 1790–c. 1914

Throughout the period between 1790 and 1914 the governments of the Australian colonies asked their populations to suspend work and amusements and join in collective acts of prayer. Australia’s special days of prayer have much historical significance and deserve more scholarly attention. They had an enduring popularity, and they were rare moments when a multi-faith and multi-ethnic community joined together to worship for a common cause. This article builds on recent work on state prayers in Britain by considering what the colonial tradition of special worship can tell us about community attachments in nineteenth-century Australia. ‘Fast days’ and ‘days of thanksgiving’ had both an imperial and a regional character. A small number of the Australian days were for imperial events (notably wars and royal occasions) that were observed on an empire-wide scale. The great majority, such as the numerous days of fasting and humiliation that were called during periods of drought, were for regional happenings and were appointed by colonial authorities. The article argues that the different types of prayer day map on to the various ways that contemporaries envisaged ‘Greater Britain’ and the ‘British world’. Prayer days for royal events helped the empire’s inhabitants to regard themselves as imperial Britons. Meanwhile, days appointed locally by colonial governments point to the strength of regional attachments. Colonists developed a sense that providence treated them differently from British communities elsewhere, and this sense of ‘national providence’ could underpin a sense of colonial difference—even a colonial nationalism. Days of prayer suggested that Greater Britain was a composite of separate communities and nationalities, but the regional feelings they encouraged could still sit comfortably with attachments to an imperial community defined by commonalities of race, religion and interest.     

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.     

Have tropical Africa's nationalisms continued imperialism's world revolution by other means?

Many scholars argue that European imperialism shaped today's tropical Africa, for better or worse. Some imperial historians see the British empire as a fertile capitalist pioneer, kindling class‐conscious, national, politics overseas. Economists of differing persuasions can see it, to the contrary, as the engineer of an underdevelopment that strangles popular sovereignty. Together with most Africanist historians, this article doubts that Europe had such creative or destructive power; British rule, among others, had to respond as much to African history as to metropolitan will. Anti‐colonial nationalisms, in turn, were neither class not ideological vanguards but regional coalitions. Nation‐building thereafter was an elusive aim, steered by minority visions imperfectly seen and widely disputed, from capitalism to socialism. All these complexities rest, it is widely argued, on the historic difficulty of exercising power in what was until recently an underpopulated continent with openly available resources.     

Gender,Sexuality and the Formation of Racial Identities in the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Caribbean World

In recent years, scholars have directed considerable attention to the influence of gender relations and sexual practices on developing racial formations in early British America, the colonial Caribbean and the wider British empire. Understanding that unauthorised intimacies in the imperial world threatened notions of Britishness at home has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the complexity and instability of the process of collective identity formation. Building on pioneering research in early American and British imperial history, this article charts the connection between gendered concepts of ‘whiteness’ in Anglo‐Caribbean contexts and in metropolitan discourses surrounding British national identity, as articulated in eighteenth‐century colonial legislation and official correspondence, popular texts and personal narratives of everyday life. It explores the extent to which the socio‐sexual practices of British West Indian whites imperilled the emerging conflation between whiteness and Britishness.     

Imperial Identity in Colonial Minds: Harold Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931-50

This article examines how the League of Coloured Peoples, foundedin London in 1931 by the Jamaican Harold Moody, used its versionof a British identity to seek equal rights for Britons of colour.I argue that by invoking an imperial British identity that drewon widely accepted elements of Britishness, namely respectabilityand imperial pride, the League gained support from black colonialsand white English people in its fight for equality. This wastrue despite the fact that a major element of the League's conceptionof British identity, racial equality, challenged the dominantidea that ‘true’ Britons were, by definition, white.The article focuses on the workings of the organization's ideologyin the context of two news-making issues: the campaign to restoreBritish citizenship to ‘coloured’ seamen in Cardiffin 1936, and the parliamentary and judicial reaction to discriminationby London's Imperial Hotel against League member Learie Constantinein 1943. The story it tells indicates that British identitieswere claimed and manipulated not only by natives of the BritishIsles, but also by colonial peoples. It further suggests thatunder the conditions of empire colonial peoples could simultaneouslyidentify with the imperial power and their (potentially national)home colony.     

Bridgeheads, ‘Colonial Places’ and the Queensland Financial Crisis of 1866

This article provides a new perspective on the links between British imperialism and metropolitan finance by showing how formal power reinforced ‘money power’ at a formative stage in the political development of the colony of Queensland. In 1866, despite the contraction of the bridgeheads of formal British authority in eastern Australia, local imperial representatives quickly aligned with private interests when British investments appeared to be threatened by a proposal to introduce a fiduciary note issue. Subsequently, Queensland politicians continued to contest the control of money and the scope of government intervention in the colonial economy. Ultimately, however, the inflow of British capital created new bridgeheads of British power in Queensland, re-constituting it as a ‘colonial place’ in the informal empire of investment and influence.