Bridgeheads of Empire? Liberated African Missionaries in West Africa

Sierra Leone's ‘New Christian Evangelists’ have sometimes been seen as a ‘bridgehead’ of imperial expansion in Nigeria, tying into the literature that sees missionaries as natural agents of empire. However, the expansion of a similar group into the Cameroons did not result in the expansion of the British Empire. This article argues that the ability to tie missionary and commercial interests to a perceived humanitarian cause—ending the slave trade—was crucial in creating the differences between Liberated African experiences of expansion in Nigeria and Cameroon.     

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.     

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.     

Better than an Ironclad: Leonard Isitt,Temperance and Greater Britain

The English-born New Zealand temperance activist, the Rev. Leonard M. Isitt, undertook a number of temperance ‘missions’ in Britain between 1895 and 1905, offering historians a deeper insight into the lived reality of the ‘British world’ and ‘Greater British’ identity. Addressing several areas of imperial historiography, the article uses newspapers from both New Zealand and Britain to acquire a truly ‘Greater British’ perspective of an imperially mobile individual, from which can be drawn lessons about imperial identities and ‘networks’. Isitt's participation in a self-consciously imperial temperance movement highlights the development of a New Zealand identity that depended upon both contrast and commonality with Britain, but it also points to a politics of imperial peregrination, with the temperance reformer's visits to the ‘Mother Country’ factoring in the highly divisive drink question in both New Zealand and Britain. The article concludes with reflections on the nature and limitations of a ‘Greater British’ politics.     

Colonial Emulation,Competition and Opportunism: A Twentieth-Century Spanish Perspective on the British and French ‘Empire Projects’

ABSTRACT

Through the views of Francisco Franco’s major adviser on African Affairs, this paper reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the long-standing interaction between competing ‘imperial projects’ in the twentieth century. Tomás García Figueras’s (1892–1981) speeches, writings and personal archive provide a long-term and well-informed Spanish perspective on the British and French colonial systems, offering us a model to make sense of three major aspects of inter-imperial relations: emulation, competition, and opportunism. Through this insight into the dynamics of imperial interaction, and the ever-evolving dialogues and exchanges between ‘empire projects’ from around the European peninsula, this article provides some key elements to answer the long-standing question of what motivates empires to expand, adapt, or contract. It illuminates the ways in which officials engaged in the day-to-day running of European empires looked at each other, in search for examples and counter-examples, emulation or, simply, opportunities. Crucially, it illustrates how ‘empire projects’ of varying clout interacted with each other, within the limits of realpolitik but well beyond linguistic obstacles, as the multilingual material assembled in the García Figueras archive clearly attests. It also charts, among national and socio-cultural circles hitherto neglected, the evolution in thinking about colonialism and decolonisation throughout the twentieth century.     

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.     

Liberal Evolutionism and the Satirical Ape

This article considers intersections between the doctrines of mid-Victorian liberalism and biological evolution using 1860s caricatures and satires from Punch. In the years following the 1859 publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, caricatures featuring satirical apes illustrated mutually supportive cultural attitudes about politics and science. Ideas of character united the discourses of mid-Victorian evolutionism with liberalism, and the confluence of these ideas, or what I term liberal evolutionism, dramatized this overlap for Victorian culture. My project shows that the apes depicted in Punch were often intended as not only whimsical responses to the theories put forward by Darwin and Mill, they also point to the formation of the British subject.     

‘Unparalleled Opportunities’: The Indian Y.M.C.A.'s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914–1920)

The present article aims to contribute to the global history of the First World War and the history of ‘imperial humanitarianism’ by taking stock of the Indian Young Men's Christian Association's Army Work schemes in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The outbreak of the war was hailed by some American secretaries of the Y.M.C.A. working in India as presenting overwhelming opportunities for their proselytising agenda. Indeed, the global conflict massively enlarged the organisation's range of activities among European soldiers stationed in South Asia and for the first time extended it to the ‘Sepoys’, i.e. Indian and Nepalese soldiers serving in the imperial army. Financially supported by the Indian public as well as by the governments of Britain and British India, the US-dominated Indian Y.M.C.A. embarked on large-scale ‘army work’ programmes in the Indian subcontinent as well as in several theatres of war almost from the outset, a fact that clearly boosted its general popularity. This article addresses the question of the effects the Y.M.C.A.'s army work schemes had for the imperial war effort and tries to assess their deeper societal and political impact as a means of educating better citizens, both British and Indian. In doing so, the article places particular emphasis on the activities of American Y-workers, scrutinising to what extent pre-existing imperial racial and cultural stereotypes influenced their perception of and engagement with the European and South Asian soldiers they wanted to transform into ‘better civilians’.     

Selling the Empire?: Marketing and the Demise of the British World,c.1920–1960

ABSTRACT

This article uses a study of the politics of marketing and advertising to consider the role that British World collaboration played in consumer politics in the UK and the Dominions between the 1920s and 1950s. We will assess how politicians and businesspeople in the Dominions responded to the Empire Marketing Board’s efforts to encourage the habit of ‘Buying British’ in the inter-war years, as well as exploring the activities of the leading American marketing agency, J. Walter Thompson. The article concludes with a discussion of how the politics of patriotic trade was recast in the 1950s. While this was a cause which had taken on different forms in Australia, Canada and South Africa during the 1930s, in each country its advocates shared a wider concern with imperial development. And yet, changes in the advertising and marketing industries, and the growth of market research, cut across efforts to promote the consumer habit of buying imperially. By the early 1960s patriotic trade campaigns in the ‘old’ Dominions were nationally focused and shorn of their earlier ‘Britannic’ identity.     

Impersonating a Voter: Constructions of Race,and Conceptions of Subjecthood in the Franchise of Colonial New South Wales,c. 1850–1865

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the treatment of Aboriginal Australians as politically entitled subjects within New South Wales during that colony's first elections under ‘universal’ male suffrage. Using the case of Yellow Jimmy, a ‘half-caste’ resident prosecuted for impersonating a white settler at an election in 1859, it examines the uncertainties that surrounded Aboriginal Australians’ position as British subjects within the colony's first constitutions. By contrast to the early colonial franchises of New Zealand and the Cape – where questions of indigenous residents’ access to enfranchisement dominated discussions of the colonies’ early constitutions – in the rare instances in which indigenous men claimed their right to vote in New South Wales, local officials used their own discretion in determining whether they held the political entitlements of British subjects. This formed a continuity with the earlier treatment of Aboriginal Australians under settler law, where British authority and imperial jurisdiction was often advanced ‘on-the-ground’ via jurists and administrators rather than via the statutes or orders of Parliament or the Colonial Office.     

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 Queen’s Dolls’ House within the British Empire Exhibition: encapsulating the British imperial world

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, designed by Edwin Landseer Lutyens and unveiled to the public in 1924 at the British Empire Exhibition. The Dolls’ House epitomised the characteristics of Britain as a nation and an empire through its English exterior and British world objects within. Marginalised in academic discourses and regarded as a plaything, this article brings the Dolls’ House back to discourses of British material and visual culture as well as Lutyens scholarship. To this end, it analyses how the design and contents of the House encapsulated the British imperial world and materialised Britain’s position in the postwar world.     

The Limits of the Shanghai Bridgehead: Understanding British Intervention in the Taiping Rebellion 1860–62

This article discusses the rationale behind British intervention in the Taiping civil war in China and the episode’s wider significance for understanding nineteenth-century British imperial expansion. I argue that the most productive way to understand the shape of the limited British intervention in the war is through analysing the relative strength of distinct bridgeheads of British interest in China. British interests in Shanghai grew rapidly in the Taiping period and helped to draw in intervention against the Taiping armies when they attacked the port in 1860 and 1862. The strict limitation of this intervention, which did not result in any imperial expansion in China, was a result of the consistent underperformance of the wider British trade with China. Without a growth in this trade, the expense of an extensive intervention and its potential consequences could not be justified. The episode suggests that analyses of local conditions and the strength of local ties to metropolitan resources are important for understanding the wider pattern of British imperial expansion.     

Amplified British Aviation Authority in Africa, 1947–1960: Regulation of Low-cost Overseas Airlines

ABSTRACT

Britain first exerted considerable civil and military aerial authority in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s. The occasional but striking presence of British pioneer pilots and aircraft was soon followed by formal agreements about Empire airbases, and operation of imperial airline service. During the Second World War, all British aviation resources in Africa were tailored to mobilising and executing military action. At the end of the War, Britain’s nationalised airline resumed scheduled commercial services to and from Africa. In the post-War Commonwealth there was demand for air services at lower prices than Britain’s flag-carrying airline offered. Private charter airlines provided long-haul but low-cost ‘trooping’ flights, ‘colonial coach’ passenger flights, and ‘tramp’ cargo flights, and consolidated and extended British aerial presence and influence in Africa. Mostly, London set and managed the regulatory regime under which they operated. Coloniality provided a key licensing element. In the 1950s, before widespread decolonisation, the authority for the least expensive long-haul flying across Africa vested in layers of complex regulation in Britain.     

‘Germanje’: Dutch empire-building in Nazi-occupied Europe

ABSTRACT

Recent historiography on Nazism has taken what has been coined ‘the imperial turn’. The key issue at stake is to what extent Germany’s expansionist policy between 1939 and 1945 could be considered a variant of the more general historical phenomenon of (modern) imperialism. Over the course of the last two decades, all sorts of continuities and parallels between traditional European colonialism and Nazi imperialism have been analysed. In these studies, a top-down approach is prevalent, concentrating on ‘Berlin’, Nazi politics and leaders. This article chooses a different perspective, bringing actors of a lower level to the fore. The focus is on the Dutch contribution to the Nazi policy of ‘Germanization’ of the occupied East. Between the summers of 1941 and 1944, over five thousand Dutch civilians voluntarily left their homeland to be employed in the so-called German occupied eastern territories. Although their contracts were often temporary, they were seen (and saw themselves) as the first group of ‘pioneers’ of a giant colonizing project. This article investigates the Dutch organizations coordinating their recruitment and employment, and zooms in on the expectations and experiences of individual recruits. With the Dutch case as an example, the article points at the broader historical context of the Dutch efforts. At the same time, it shows that this junior partner of the German had his own colonial agenda. The incompatibility of both agendas inevitably led to false expectations, caused a general sense of disillusionment on both sides and led to many frictions ‘on the spot’.     

Britain,Empire and the Origins of the Cold War Youth Race

The Soviet politicization of international youth during the inter-war and wartime years was identified by British policy-makers as a most serious threat to British imperial power. Asserting the significance of and interplay between colonial youth and imperial ideology in the politics of the cultural Cold War, this article thus examines how the British conceptualized and sought to compete in the Cold War ‘youth race’ between 1945 and 1949. While funding was the most obvious disadvantage, this article argues that Britain’s fatal weakness was its inability to escape the consequences of colonialism, including the tendency to rely on repressive legislation.     

Contested Cartographies: Empire and Sovereignty on a Map of Sistān,Iran (1883)

ABSTRACT

The papers of Malkam Khān (1833–1908), Iranian ambassador in London from 1872 to 1889, a staunch supporter of Iranian state modernization and a scholar, include an often-overlooked map of the Iran–Afghanistan border dating to 1883. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi compiled this exceptional piece of nineteenth-century Iranian cartography. The map is an illustration of how quickly the Qajar administration was able to emulate European cartographical discourses to protect its own interests in the context of the so-called ‘Great Game’, that is, the often confrontational Russo–British relations over the control of Central Asia and Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. In this article we show that Iranian officials had developed a much more substantial articulation between cartography and statecraft than is conveyed by the stereotypes in nineteenth-century Western literature, when the capacity of local players to use counter-mapping to their own advantage was often underestimated by European agents. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi’s map of Sistān exemplifies how the apparently all-powerful Western science that seemingly supported nineteenth-century imperial expansion was rarely left unchallenged locally. The genealogy and circulation of the map also reflects how overly simplistic the postulation of a polarization of ‘Western’ knowledge and ‘Eastern’ attempts at safeguarding local sovereignty can be.     

Empire,Repetition, and Reluctant Subjects: British Home Movies of Kenya, 1928–72

This article examines efforts by a range of British visitors to produce ‘home movies’ or amateur film of Kenya from 1928 to 1972, and attempts by both the British film-makers and Kenyans to navigate and influence this production. By bringing cine-cameras to Kenya to record images to be consumed back in the metropole by family and friends as ‘holiday films’, these British visitors laid bare what a number of historians have identified as the ‘imperial gaze’ that defined both colonial and post-colonial conceptions of Africa. Colonialism’s obsession with ordering and positioning bodies within a projected image of power and control made cinema the perfect vessel for such an exercise, while amateur film, with its often clumsy framing and highly personal interaction between the film-maker and the film subject, grants us unique insight into the sometimes coercive, transactional and forced efforts involved in projecting such an image. The amateur films that sit at the centre of this article, which were produced by British visitors to Kenya both before and after independence, offers us the opportunity to examine the wide range of behaviours of both the film-maker and the filmed which underpinned the production of repetitive imperial image-making in colonial and post-colonial Kenya.     

Imperial Connections: Frederick Lugard,Charles Hartley,and Hubert Lyautey’s English Influences

ABSTRACT

This article examines the English influence on the thinking of the French colonial soldier and administrator Marshal Hubert Lyautey (1854–1934) through his interactions with the colonial Governor Lord Frederick Lugard (1858–1945) and the Victorian Engineer Sir Charles Hartley (1825–1915). Whereas Lyautey’s affinity for the British approach to colonial governance has long been noted, earlier considerations focussed on translated texts as the means by which knowledge of British practice was disseminated. Adopting a micro-historical approach, this essay instead scrutinises Lyautey’s encounters with Lugard and Hartley, both in person and in correspondence, so as to assess their influence upon him. Consequently, it can be seen that although Lugard is held up as a cross-channel equivalent of Lyautey, whose career spanned a similar period and whose ideas and approach to colonial governance mirrored those of the Frenchman, his influence upon Lyautey was minor. In fact, following correspondence in the mid-1920s, the two men met for the first time as part of a process of rapprochement which helped to forge a new link between the pair and to position them as Franco-British counterparts. Although this episode afforded both men the opportunity to reflect on the thinking of the other, in Lyautey’s case such knowledge as was acquired only reinforced ideas he had generated years earlier. Conversely, although Lyautey’s meeting with Sir Charles Hartley on the banks of the Danube in 1893 was fleeting, and of consequence only to the Frenchman, it exercised a profound effect upon him. Coming at an opportune moment in his transformation from metropolitan cavalry officer to fully-fledged colonial soldier, Lyautey would return to this encounter at intervals throughout the rest of his life, highlighting its importance in teaching him about the possibilities of a life abroad and what could be realised by a capable ‘man of action’. This article argues that a transnational lens allows for a deeper appreciation of the complexities of Franco-British imperial relations. The example of Lyautey’s encounters illustrates that national competitors could also be individual collaborators. Depending on the circumstances, enmity could exist alongside admiration, even at times of increasing cross-channel tension.     

Church,State, and the Holy Land: British Protestant Approaches to Imperial Policy in Palestine, 1917–1948

British Protestants had long held to the notion of a legitimate Protestant interest in the Christian ‘Holy Land’, a concept that helped bolster Britain's political claim to Palestine in the aftermath of the First World War. Evangelical Protestant visions of the return of the Jews to their biblical homeland encouraged imperial support for Zionism and helped define the unique conditions of British mandate rule. But once the British actually assumed power over Palestine, British Protestants began to find themselves seriously at odds over their moral and political obligations in the new possession their interests had helped to shape. This article explores three broad Protestant attitudes towards the question of Britain's policy towards Palestine during the mandate period, demonstrating the ways in which Lambeth Palace, Protestant metropolitan mission institutions, and Protestant church workers in Palestine itself developed radically different conceptions of their religious and political responsibilities in what they regarded as their ‘Holy Land’.