Imperial Rome and Britain's Language of Empire 1600–1837

Britain's pre-Victorian overseas expansion stimulated Roman comparisons. But imperial Rome was a warning as much as an inspiration to future empires, a harsh and uncomfortable model for Britain as a former Roman colony. Roman dignity was claimed for British monarchs and achievements by Dryden and others. But there were mixed feelings about identifying expanding Britain as a second Roman Empire. In the eighteenth century the British freedom-fighter Caractacus, defeated by the Romans, appealed far more to popular taste than Virgil's Aeneas or the Emperor Augustus. Sustained unease about imperial Rome, going right back to Tacitus, anticipated the liberal critique of imperialism of some Victorian and Edwardian commentators.     

Social Careers Across Imperial Spaces: An Empire Family in the Dutch-British World, 1811-1933

Here the object biography of a scale model of an old Dutch colonial sugar factory directs us to the history of an extended family, and demonstrates the connectedness of people and identities across and within European imperial spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study shows how people in colonial Indonesia became ‘Dutch’ through their social networks and cultural capital (for instance a European education). They even came to belong to the colonial and national Dutch elites while, because of their descent, also belonging to the British colonial and national elites. These intertwined Dutch and British imperial spaces formed people’s identities and status: the family discussed here became an important trans-imperial patrician family with a broad imperial ‘spatial imagination’, diverse identities and social circles. It was mostly women who played important roles in these transnational processes— roles indeed that they played well into the early twentieth century when colonial empires ceased to exist and the nation-state became the ‘natural’ social and political form of the modern world, obscuring these transnational processes.     

Babies on Board: Women,Children and Imperial Policy in the Spanish Empire

From 1778 to 1784, in an attempt to colonise Patagonia, the Spanish Crown transported more than 1,900 peasants from northern Spain to the Río de la Plata. Based on Enlightenment ideas about economy and society, the Crown used the colonisation scheme to assert control over some of its most marginal subjects. In the hope of transforming these peasants from poverty‐stricken burdens on society into filial agents of empire, the Crown invested heavily in the health and wellbeing of the colonising mothers and children, and clearly established the monarchy as a benevolently powerful paternal authority.     

Architecture,Local Elites,and Imperial Entanglements: The Wari Empire and the Cotahuasi Valley of Peru

Abstract

One of the enduring problems in the archaeology of ancient states and empires is the recognition of different forms of regional consolidation in the archaeological record. Among the clearer markers of direct control over an area is thought to be the construction of an administrative facility. Our recent research on the impact of the Wari Empire (A.C. 750–1000) in the Cotahuasi Valley of Peru, however, suggests that facilities built by and for local elites may emulate so many aspects of state facilities that they can be misinterpreted as intrusive sites. We demonstrate how the Cotahuasi sites diverge from the architectural canon found at Wari administrative facilities and suggest why this convergence of local and imperial architectural styles occurred.     

The Cyprus Proposition: Lord Curzon and Cyprus in British Imperial Strategy, 1914 to 1919

Abstract

Debate about the strategic importance of Cyprus to Britain during and immediately after World War I has been overlooked by historians. During this period several key departments, politicians and officials argued strongly and in a concerted way for British retention of the island. This article investigates their reasoning and the arguments of those who championed its cession to Greece. Particular attention is given to the opinions of Lord Curzon, whose career was steeped in long-standing Anglo-Russian rivalries in Asia and the strategic doctrines which underpinned it. Reference is also made to the political, diplomatic and strategic context in which Curzon and his colleagues debated the issue.     

Empire, emigration and school geography: changing discourses of Imperial citizenship, 1880–1925

The state school curriculum, and geography in particular, played a role in encouraging emigration to the colonies, if not in actually educating for emigration. Emigration was an implicit and explicit topic in school geography, and was increasingly endorsed after the 1885 Revised Instructions to inspectors of schools which explicitly sought the promotion of emigration to young people as an “honourable enterprise”. Early-twentieth century school geography texts were part of the broader imperial discourse which valorized the settler Dominions over the tropical colonies and portrayed them as the good citizen's choice for emigration. The 1922 Empire Settlement Act represented the British government's most direct intervention in supporting out-migration from Britain, but texts at this time were generally less jingoistic than some of their forerunners, in keeping with the changed attitudes in post-World War I Britain.