Lancashire's ‘War’ with Australia: Rethinking Anglo-Australian Trade and the Cultural Economy of Empire, 1934–36

Following the recent cultural turn in economic history, this article resurrects a neglected imperial trade war between Lancashire and Australia to explore the nature of the cultural economy of the British Empire in the interwar period. New work has emphasised the importance of Britishness as the basis for co-ethnic networks that helped underwrite imperial expansion through the nineteenth century. However, this welcome new focus on culture’s significance for economics has, curiously, tended to obscure its dynamic interaction with the economy. Economic activity did not simply benefit from culture, as concepts like co-ethnicity suggest, but also helped to produce that culture. As result, the meanings of Britishness mobilised by trade were never stable, even in the heart of empire itself. This article focuses on a boycott of Australian produce started by grocers in Lancashire cotton towns in 1934, in response to new Australian tariffs on imported cotton goods. Tracing the cultural meanings constructed from the very first planting of cotton in Australia, through to the boycott and its aftermath, exemplifies the dynamic and contingent nature of Britishness generated through trade.     

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.     

4. IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY IN MUGHAL AND BRITISH FORMS

Azfar Moin's recent work on millennial sovereignty in Mughal India prompts a consideration of the evolution of sovereignty in modern South Asia more broadly. Although the sovereign principles of the Mughals differed from those of the British Indian empire, which ultimately succeeded it, these empires shared important similarities in their linking of sovereign authority to visions of a cosmos in immanent interaction with human affairs. This article explores these similarities and differences and speculatively considers their implications for both similarities and differences in Mughal and British principles of statecraft. These similarities and differences provide an important backdrop for thinking about the meanings attached to popular sovereignty in modern India as well.     

The British Empire and revolutionary national poetry

ABSTRACT. The British empire set off an explosion of poetry, in English and native languages, particularly in India, Africa and the Middle East. This poetry – largely neglected in the scholarship on nationalism – was often revolutionary both aesthetically and politically, expressing a spirit of cultural independence. Attacks on England and the empire are common not just in native colonial poetry but also in poetry of the British isles. This article discusses some of the most influential poets, including: Shawqi of Egypt, Tagore of India, Rusafi of Iraq, Yeats of Ireland, Iqbal of Pakistan, Greenberg of pre‐State Israel, and Kipling, the ‘poet of empire’. In contrast with other empires, many poets were inspired by British culture to create revolutionary art and seek political independence. Most strikingly, British rule was instrumental in the revival of vernacular Hebrew poetry after 1917 as the centre of Hebrew literature shifted from Odessa to Tel Aviv.     

‘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.     

保卫印度：19世纪英国东方外交的全部秘密

印度在英帝国内具有特殊的地位。印度以及通往印度贸易通道的安全因此成为英帝国战略防卫的关键。19世纪英国在东方的全部外交与军事行动几乎都围绕着这一主题。     

Review Article: Professional,Political, and Mercenary Soldiers

Since the late 1970s, most scholarship on the origins of the Zionist–Palestinian conflict has emphasised the actions and agency of the Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, with a focus on the period before 1914. It is argued in this article, however, that the expectation of and commitment to political independence on both sides, a defining feature of the conflict, did not emerge until 1918, and that the actions of the British government in Palestine during the final year of the First World War drove this fundamental shift. Following Britain's occupation of southern Palestine in December 1917, the British administration undertook an extensive propaganda operation in the country to advertise their backing for Arab nationalism and Zionism. This campaign was part of the British government's wider endeavour to mobilise support for the Allied war effort and British imperial expansion in the Middle East in the new age of nationality. It led, the article contends, to a war for national sovereignty over Palestine between two statist nationalist movements. Rather than emphasise British colonial agency at the expense of that of the Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, the article argues that this development derived from a complex interaction between the three parties within the context of radical changes in international politics.     

英国海外粮食公司活动考察

1947年,英国成立海外粮食公司,主要是为解决战后初年面临的经济困难,如食品短缺和美元荒。公司的主要任务是实施东非花生种植计划,该计划虽然一改再改,到50年代中期仍以失败告终。失败的重要原因是脱离了客观实际,特别是过分低估了清除灌木丛的难度。海外粮食公司的活动期正是世界范围内民族解放运动如火如荼的时期,英国的殖民统治受到严峻挑战,英属东非正在走向独立。这不能不说是英国海外粮食公司失败的重大时代背景。     

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.     

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.     

The Failure of ‘Liberal Developmentalism’: The United States's Anti-Communist Showcase in Guatemala, 1954–1960

This article examines the British involvement in the reorganisation of the Ottoman Empire's customs service. The study focuses particularly on the role of Sir Richard Crawford, who was appointed as a consultant to the Ottoman customs administration in 1909. In doing so, the article sheds fresh light on the position of European advisers as well as on British commercial diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire during the years preceding the First World War. This topic warrants further historical research as previous studies have not considered Crawford's position and the progress of the customs reform in detail. He introduced some important reforms, but proved unable to solve the complex question over the porterage service or to increase customs revenue as much as had been anticipated. War and revolution as well as the consequent disruption of trade; the vast geographical scope of the Ottoman Empire; and opposition from local and international stakeholders to his reforms explain to some extent why Crawford was unable to modernise the customs service as effectively as had been planned. In addition, Crawford's professional background and his personal characteristics were in some ways incompatible with the requirements of the demanding diplomatic world of Constantinople.     

二元型殖民地与非殖民化

二元型殖民地是殖民化中形成的三种主要类型的殖民地之一.英国的非殖民化经历了四个阶段.非殖民化对二元型殖民地产生了独特的影响,集中体现在非殖民化的冲击与产生正面效果之间存有一个明显的时间差,实行多种族统治的新国家较多地保留了原有的政治、经济制度.这些特征将继续推动或制约这类殖民地形成的国家的未来发展.     

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.     

The quest for a census of the British Empire c.1840–1940

Regular population censuses are an integral part of the oversight functions of the modern state. Whereas the United Kingdom instituted a decennial enumeration in 1801, it was not extended to the overseas Empire. The administration of the British Empire was decentralised and early nineteenth-century census taking was subject to local initiatives. However, from the 1840s successive Colonial Secretaries considered a unified imperial census necessary to fulfil their oversight functions and demanded the taking of censuses by colonial governments to coincide with that in the United Kingdom. Initial responses were mixed, but with each decade the coverage improved, although no agreement was reached on the questions posed and the classification systems employed. These remained severe drawbacks to the creation of a comprehensive imperial view. Only in 1906 was an official volume entitled Report on the Census of the British Empire published. The experience gained in its preparation, collating the diverse colonial reports prompted the undertaking of a fully coordinated enumeration in 1911. The First World War intervened and prevented publication. Although subsequent attempts were made to revive the concept, little was achieved. The combination of the pursuit of local interests, accentuated by greater political independence, and the lack of adequate resources at the General Register Office in London to coordinate and analyse the results ensured that the quest for a unified census was finally abandoned with the onset of the Second World War.     

The Revolt against the West: Decolonisation and its Repercussions in British International Thought, 1945–75

It has been suggested that British intellectuals were either indifferent to decolonisation or sought to downplay its impact. As a consequence, historians of international thought have overlooked the extensive debates that occurred among scholars and intellectuals concerned with British foreign policy and international relations. This article addresses those debates, examining the responses of internationalist, Whig, realist, and radical thinkers to decolonisation and to what they thought to be the changes it brought about in contemporary world politics. It argues that far from being indifferent to decolonisation, many British students of international relations were deeply worried about what some called ‘the revolt against the West’, and that those concerned helped shape the distinctive character of British international thought in the formative period of the discipline of International Relations (IR).     

Command,Leadership, and Doctrine on the Great War Battlefield: The Australian,British, and Canadian Experience at the Battle of Arras,May 1917

Abstract

The experience on the Somme in 1916, and the unprecedented losses suffered in the attempt to break through the German defences, forced the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to re-evaluate its attack doctrine. James Edmonds, the of?cial historian of the British army in the Great War has stated, ‘It is not too much to claim that the foundations of the ?nal victory on the Western Front were laid by the Somme offensive of 1916’. Gary Shef?eld reaf?rmed this view more recently: ‘The battle of the Somme was not a victory in itself, but without it the entente would not have emerged victorious in 1918’. Historical assessments of the Somme campaign are divided regarding the success and/or failure of the battle, but it is clear that the experience spurred efforts to correct the problems encountered in 1916. Infantry tactics, weapons, training, artillery, machine guns, command and control, communications, and support services were all adapted based on the lessons learned at the Somme. Only seven months after the catastrophic losses suffered on 1 July, the BEF embarked on it next major offensive at Arras. This article will examine the ?ghting on one day of the Arras offensive to analyse the evolution of the British Empire method of attack. On 3 May 1917 Haig ordered an attack by First, Third, and Fifth Armies astride the Scarpe River. At 0345 hours fourteen British, Canadian, and Australian divisions launched an assault against German positions in the Drocourt-Quéant Switch and Hindenburg Line. By the end of the day all British divisions has been repulsed while the Australians maintained a toehold in the German line. Only the Canadians were able to capture and hold their objective. This article will argue that command and the application of doctrine made the difference between success and failure on that day.     

The Revisionist Union and Britain: From declarations of “loyalty” to the employment of “methods of bullying”

The nature of British rule in Palestine, as it settled down after the approval of the Mandate in 1922, had its critics among the Zionist ranks. Using original sources, this paper examines the attitudes of the leadership of the Revisionist Union (RU) towards the British from the first quarter of the 1920s till the mid-1930s. Unlike the later paramilitary organizations, the Revisionist founders, convinced, in their own words, of the common interests shared with the British Empire, had no intention of terminating the British presence, but sought to transform it in order to serve Zionism’s objectives. While official Zionism preferred backstage diplomacy, the RU pursued a different strategy – appealing directly to the masses and making its cause as public and vocal as possible. Eventually, the RU’s strategy combined the principle of pro-British orientation with merciless criticism of Palestine policies on the ground. As far as the British were concerned, the Colonial Office was at best willing to tolerate a set of proposals they saw as unrealistic. Once these started to actively erode the integrity of British policy in the region, unsolicited “enthusiasm” was reclassified as dangerous “extremism.”