Protection from the British Empire? Central Africa and the Church of Scotland

This article demonstrates that the Church of Scotland did not seek to undermine the Central African Federation from the moment of its foundation in 1953. This misconception derives from many of the church's missionaries in the region who demonstrated open disdain for the Federation throughout its existence. They were upset that it had been imposed by the white settlers of Central Africa and the British government over the objections of the indigenous Africans. The church, however, did not follow its missionaries. Instead, it sought to make the federal scheme work for all concerned. The Reverend George MacLeod, perhaps the most visible church leader of the twentieth century, played an important role in trying to make the Federation function between 1953 and early 1959. It was not until after the declaration of the Nyasaland Emergency in March 1959 that the church passed a deliverance demanding an autonomous, African-run Nyasaland, at the behest of MacLeod's Committee Anent Central Africa. Deliverances are resolutions presented to the commissioners of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The commissioners listen to the deliverances and then choose to accept, reject, add to, or amend each of them. Deliverances accepted, or passed, by the General Assembly become law. These laws determine how the Church of Scotland operates. This divergence between the Church of Scotland and its missionaries before the Emergency resulted from the Church's sense of historical obligation to protect the indigenous peoples of Nyasaland from the possibly deleterious consequences of rapid decolonisation. Afterwards, the church focused on protecting the Africans from the federal government by setting them free from the British Empire.     

An Empire, Then a Republic?

Book reviewed in this article:
Patrick J. Buchanan,. A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny     

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.     

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.     

An international civilization? Empire,internationalism and the crisis of the mid‐twentieth century

This article explores the notion of an international civilization in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century thinking on international relations and the state system. This idea was fundamental to Victorian thinking about relations between Europe and the rest of the world, and was particularly important in reconciling the universal claims of liberal thought with the spread of European imperial control in Africa and Asia. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, the collapse of liberalism and the rise of ideological conflict within Europe led to the gradual retreat from eurocentric claims to civilizational predominance. The emergence of a genuinely global international order after 1945 through the United Nations occurred simultaneously with the collapse of the idea of an international civilization.     

Who Owns the Victorians?

In contrast to Peter K. Andersson, Steinbach argues that there is a great deal of scholarly work on working-class Victorians and that the works of Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault are not particularly influential. She argues, first, that ‘middle class’ and ‘respectability’ are terms more useful to Victorian Studies than Andersson’s ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘civilized’; second, that interdisciplinarity is too difficult to achieve and maintain, both on the individual and the institutional levels. She concludes by proposing that Victorian Studies instead commit to a multidisciplinary model.     

Colonial Servicemen and their British ‘War Brides’: First World War Marriages in the British Empire

This article uses the phenomenon and failure of war marriages between British women and ‘colonial’ servicemen, mostly from the settler dominions, to explore the gendered, classed and racialised conditions of migration after the First World War. Positioning this migration of British war brides as part of the continued normalisation of settler occupation, the article demonstrates the patriarchal social expectations to which white women were subject. Fears of ‘khaki fever’ were extended to the protection of naïve ‘colonial’ soldiers from the manipulative sexuality of white, particularly working-class, women and girls. At the same time, ‘respectable’ women were prepared for frontier life and protected from the indignities of bigamy and desertion. The emphasis on their role as ‘daughters of Empire’ meant ‘undesirable’ matches and marital failure, as reported by the press, had consequences for the closeness of the imperial family and the maintenance of white superiority. The mediation of mobility in cases of mixed-race marriage indicate a more explicit, and sometimes violent, policing of the sexual independence of women and Black and indigenous men of colour. In doing so, the article makes an important contribution to understandings of the legacies of global mobilisation and colonial encounters during the First World War.     

Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?

In April 2011, a landmark hearing before the High Court in London found that the British government had a case to answer concerning abuse and torture allegedly carried out by British officials in Kenya during the Mau Mau counter-insurgency. Prior to the hearing, it was revealed that the British government had removed some 1,500 ‘sensitive’ government files from Kenya at independence, many of these relating to alleged abuses carried our during the Emergency of the 1950s. This discovery then led directly to the revelation of a further tranche of 8,800 historical files relating to the decolonisation of 36 other former British colonies. This article explains the nature of the claims of torture and abuse made in the Kenya case in the High Court, and then describes the new evidence in the recently disclosed documents. The concluding section then discusses the Kenya case and the implications of the larger discovery of the ‘lost’ British Empire archive.