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.     

Algerian Orphans and Colonial Christianity in Algeria, 1866-1939

This article considers the exceptional fate of the orphan survivorsof the great Algerian demographic crisis of the late 1860s whosubsequently converted to Catholicism. Using a prosopographicalapproach, this study seeks to highlight the complexities ofnational identity in France and to explore some of the racialtensions emerging in Algeria in the late nineteenth century.     

Intersecting Identities: Race,Military Affiliation,and Youth Attitudes towards War

Abstract

African-Americans in the U.S. military encompass at least two distinct identity groups: a racial status associated with lower support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a military status which tends to be more ‘hawkish’ in perspective. This study examines the intersection of these two status characteristics utilizing survey data of American military academy cadets, Reserve Officer Training Corp (ROTC) cadets, and civilian students (n = 5,051). Majorities of military cadets, regardless of race, supported both of these wars more than their civilian counterparts, but African-Americans are significantly less supportive of the wars relative to their peers within each group. African-American cadets support both wars less so than whites and cadets of other races, but African-American cadets supported both wars more than African-American civilians. It appears that racial and military affiliations combine to yield a unique perspective on war, adapting elements of both statuses. These findings support the concept of intersectionality.     

Memories of an Imperial City: Race,Gender, and Birmingham,Alabama

September 15, 2013, marked the 50^th anniversary of the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, USA. The bombing remains one of the most infamous events in the history of white supremacist violence in the United States. While conventional accounts of the event and its aftermath often consider the legal restructuring of the US state following the passage of subsequent Civil Rights legislation, little has been written about the transnational significance of Birmingham in shaping the character of US power abroad. This article argues that memorialisation and cultural architecture of Birmingham represent a significant crucible forging a particular style of liberal empire. Tracing a cultural genealogy of Birmingham through the writings of former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and famed scholar-activist Angela Davis, I demonstrate how Birmingham, as a site of historic black struggle, has been remembered alongside the place-making of empire.     

Sarah and Her Sisters: Letters,Emotions, and Colonial Identities in the Early Modern Atlantic World

This article uses letters by indigenous converts to explore how early modern Moravian missions in the Atlantic imagined themselves as emotional communities. Moravian missions were the most successful Protestant mission enterprise in the Atlantic and established numerous missions across several empires and vastly different indigenous cultures. By comparing the letters from indigenous converts across the Atlantic rim (North America, Caribbean and Greenland) I argue that indigenous people used the medium of the written letter to participate in an imagined emotional community of Moravians while at the same time they negotiated inescapable social and gendered differences in very specific colonial contexts.     

Defending the Faith: Orangeism and Ulster Protestant Identities in Colonial New South Wales

The Orange Order was never as prominent in the Australian colonies as its own publicity asserted and its arguments against the power of Rome in Australian politics and society were more shrill than accurate. However, it held a clearly defined position as a vector of anti‐Catholicism and ultra‐Protestantism in many parts of colonial Australia, and its parades and social gatherings were important spaces for the formation of Australian Protestant identities imbued with varying levels of Irishness. The use of public space meant that the Loyal Orange Institution had a wider impact than their often small numbers might otherwise suggest. With their parades, sermons, public meetings, and demonstrations many Orangemen and women attempted to claim colonial public space not only as Protestant, but as a particularly Irish inflected anti‐Catholicism.     

Imperial Remains and Imperial Invitations: Centering Race within the Contemporary Large-Scale Infrastructures of East Africa

In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large-scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologising and resistance to it on the continent.     

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.     

Imperial Mobility: The Colonial Worlds of Sir Anthony and Lady Jeanie Musgrave

Mobility—of people, products, and capital—is a common trope of the contemporary globalized world. Yet, mobility is not only a current phenomenon, but has an integral role in the constitution of past empires. In particular, the governance of empire requires the mobility of administrators and their families: people who, in the service of empire, travel between metropole and periphery, and even more typically, in the multiple circuits between peripheries. The life of Sir Anthony Musgrave, a colonial administrator who served in posts in the Caribbean, Canada, South Africa, and Australia, exemplifies the movement which empire demands. In their travels around the British world of the late nineteenth century, the Musgraves—Sir Anthony, his American-born wife Lady Jeanie, and their three sons—engaged with empire in ways both physical and conceptual. In this essay, I explore how the Musgraves’ mobility contributed to a sense of overlapping colonial worlds that were supported and challenged by the rise of communication and transport technologies, the flows of international labor, and the competing demands of national and imperial identities.     

Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

This article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived.