Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment,Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939

From the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, approximately 380,000 transportation convicts journeyed to and around locations across the British Empire. This article explores the scale, reach and significance of these convict flows in the period after 1788, arguing for a transnational history of penal transportation in the Australian colonies and Indian Ocean. It quantifies convict numbers, and maps convict destinations, providing comparative data on their intra-imperial character to construct a new cartography of criminal justice and Empire. Focusing on Asian convict flows, this enables an articulation of the relationship between transportation, population management and repression, as well as other forms of coerced labour migration, including African and Asian enslavement and indenture. The history of penal transportation proposed here thus moves beyond an exploration of its role in the outward metropolitan expansion of Empire, and towards an appreciation of its importance in labour extraction and governance within the larger imperial world.     

Imperial Eyes: Imperial Spies. British Travel and Espionage in Southern Arabia, 1891–1946

From the late nineteenth century, a number of British travellers ventured far from the comforts of the colony of Aden, that lone imperial seat in southern Arabia, into the unknown, neighbouring worlds of the Hadhramaut and Turkish Yemen. This article traces a number of those remarkable journeys and their aftermaths, to uncover that the relationships which these travellers held with the British government varied greatly. Some were actively encouraged to travel while others found rather less support from government officials. Archive material is employed to investigate a number of ventures made into Yemen and the Aden Protectorates by British travellers from the 1890s to 1940s and the value of certain travellers to Britain's imperial project in Arabia.     

Treating His Imperial Majesty's Warts: British Policy towards Iran 1977–79

Analysis of British policy towards Iran during the shah's final years has tended to be the preserve of those who formulated it. In general, it has focused on the extent to which British policymakers predicted the events of the Iranian revolution (published accounts by British policymakers include: Anthony Parsons, The Pride and The Fall: Iran 1974–1979 (1984); David Owen, Time to Declare (1991); Ivor Lucas, A Road To Damascus: Mainly Diplomatic Memoirs from the Middle East (1997), and “Revisiting the Decline and Fall of the Shah of Iran” (2009)). This article is different in both its sources and scope. Unlike any other published study on Anglo-Iranian relations, it relies on government records recently released in the National Archives. Instead of focusing on the British response to the Iranian revolution, it seeks to account for the strength of the shah's leverage and illustrate its consequences during one of the most important periods in Iran's history.     

Burma–Bengal Crossings: Intercolonial Connections in Pre-Independence India

The large-scale movement of people between Burma and Bengal in the early twentieth century has been explored recently by authors such as Sugata Bose and Sunil Amrith who locate Burma within the wider migratory culture of the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia. This article argues that the long and historical connections between Bengalis and Burmese were transformed by the British colonisation of the region. Through an analysis of selected literary texts in Bengali, some by well-known and others by obscure writers, this article shows that, for Indians, Burma constituted an elsewhere where the fantastic and superhuman were within reach, and caste and religious constraints could be circumvented and radical possibilities enabled by masquerade and disguise.     

Jewish Refugees in Cyprus and British Imperial Sovereignty in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1933–1949

This paper focuses on the use of the British Colony of Cyprus as a clearing ground for Jewish refugees on route to Palestine before, during, and after the Second World War. While acknowledging the historiographical consensus underscoring Cyprus’ renewed strategic importance in the context of British post-Second World War imperial retreat in the East, the article argues that Jewish transmigration revealed new potential uses for the island which in turn contributed to confirm British sovereignty in that possession. Drawing on British and Cypriot sources, the article further shows the transformative impact of Jewish transmigration for Cyprus politics as it induced British authorities, who had established an authoritarian regime in the island in the 1930s, to invoke Cypriot reactions in order to stem the flow of refugees to the island. This paved the way for future policies meant to redefine the relations between rulers and ruled. As the management of refugees coming to Cyprus during the period under scrutiny relied on ever more refined instruments of classification, the paper finally highlights the contribution of Empire to the crafting of official categories to designate people on the move—‘refugees’, ‘illegal immigrants’—which still inform European migration policies.     

Imperial Legacies and Internationalist Discourses: British Involvement in the United Nations Freedom from Hunger Campaign, 1960–70

Between 1960 and 1965, the British public raised almost seven million pounds to support the Freedom from Hunger Campaign (FFHC), a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization initiative that funded agricultural development projects across the underdeveloped world in an effort to ‘help the hungry to help themselves’. With the involvement of more than 100 countries and affiliated NGOs, the FFHC was by a considerable margin the largest humanitarian effort of its time, but it also forms part of a specifically British story about imperial benevolence and imperial decline. This article uses the British public's support for the campaign as a window onto the changing experience of British humanitarianism during an era of decolonisation. Did the British public's moral geography change as they lost their empire? Was there a role for the empire/commonwealth within the framework of an international campaign such as Freedom from Hunger? Which imperial legacies remained intact in the FFHC, which were adapted and which discarded?     

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’.