Explorers' Tales: Stanley Presumes – Again

In the early 1970s, Australia and Britain found themselves embroiled in an embarrassing diplomatic controversy over Australia's failure to provide an assisted passage to Jan Allen, a British citizen of Jamaican descent. Allen lodged a formal complaint with the British Race Relations Board, arguing he had been denied assistance on the grounds of his race. The Board was compelled to investigate the case, raising the possibility that British and Australian officials would face legal charges. This article outlines the complex diplomatic negotiations that surrounded the case and assesses its outcome. It argues that the controversy marked an important milestone in Australia-British relations, reinforcing the fact that British race patriotism could no longer mediate the self-identities and interrelations of the two countries. It contributed to Britain's decision to withdraw its support for the United Kingdom-Australia Assisted Passage Scheme and the eventual abolition of Australia's ‘White Australia’ policy     

Character and imperialism: The british financial administration of Egypt, 1878–1914

The main purpose of the article is to try to show how British governing elites constructed their world through a complex mental grid summed up in the word ‘character’ and how this impacted upon imperial governance. The latter theme is then illustrated through a detailed study of the financial policies of the small cadre of British officials who controlled Egyptian government in this period. They used the language of character to justify being in Egypt in the first place and it clearly influenced the financial policies they adopted. More fundamentally, as we shall see, the character grid gave them a very negative view of Egyptians and their society and made it impossible for them to recognise that nationalist claims for autonomy had any validity.     

Enshrined in Law: Legislative Justifications for the Removal of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Children in Colonial and Post-Colonial Australia

While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and ‘native’ welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and practices to be informed by different forces and to vary by jurisdiction. However, by analysing the debates around legislation from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article establishes commonalities as well as differences in both the arguments used to justify Indigenous and non-Indigenous child removal and the practices that evolved in the implementation of such legislation. By interrogating such arguments through the lens of whiteness and race, the article identifies the role which child removal was imagined to play in the process of building the settler colonial nation.     

Making leeway in the Leewards, 1929–51: The negotiation of colonial development

Britain began to sponsor economic development in its colonial territories under the Colonial Development Act of 1929. The first CDA project was for housing on Antigua; other schemes for the Leewards soon followed. The isolation and poverty of this colony highlighted the practical difficulties of promoting development. Challenges included the negotiation of new methods of administration. Governors conceded autonomy in return for assistance; under pressure from Treasury, the Colonial Office learned how to supervise far-flung projects, while its subject departments gained influence at the expense of the regional. Trial and error in the design and supervision of projects on the Leewards provided information about what types of housing policy were cost-effective and acceptable locally. By the 1950s the advice of United States experts also made itself felt. Funds provided under the CDA and later development Acts were limited, but they transformed the machinery and influenced the content of colonial policy.     

Ideology and British expansion in Bengal, 1757–72

Accounts of the early stages of British expansion in India have tended to emphasise its unplanned and opportunistic character; they have often seen the motors of expansion lying within unstable Indian states or in the need of the East India Company to meet the costs of fast-growing armies. Reviewing the evidence from Bengal between 1757 and 1772, this article argues that a distinctive kind of frontier patriotism generated in the East India Company's Indian settlements constituted an important ideological context for its conquests. Company servants routinely derided Indian rulers as Asiatic despots, or ‘faithless’ Muslims. Their sense of Indian rulers as degenerate and corrupt both fuelled military aggression, and also made some Britons suppose that the East India Company could effect rapid reforms in Bengal, drawing out previously untapped surpluses from the agrarian base. At the same time, the need to forge alliances within the old regime encouraged some Company officials to adopt a more conciliatory tone, and to imagine that viable systems of political order existed within the traditions of the Mughal empire.