‘Why Disgrace the Commonwealth?’ Ceylonese Communalism,the Search for Global Influence and the Politics of a Transnational Organisation, 1948–65

This article examines the progress of the commonwealth as a forum for political action by Ceylonese in the first two decades after the nation’s independence by focusing on the debate over Tamil political rights. Significantly, this domestic conflict intensified during a crucial phase in the commonwealth’s transition, from being essentially a members’ club consisting of Britain and the settler dominions to a multilateral organisation led by newly independent African and Asian states. In this ambivalent geopolitical landscape, an emerging small state such as Ceylon sought to use the commonwealth in such a way as to project itself on the world stage, while at the same time some of its citizens adopted the organisation as a focus for liberal causes against the state. In this way, it is argued, the ‘new commonwealth’ was being shaped by postcolonial British legacies of global influence and liberal politics.     

Science and Politics in the Hawaiian Kingdom: The Progress of the Honolulu Social Science Association, 1882–87

The growth in studies of Indigenous responses to the gradual foreign control and American annexation of the Hawaiian Islands has provided an important corrective to dominant trends in earlier Hawaiian historiography, but there has been comparatively little recent work on the attitudes and values of those identified as colonizers. In particular, how Western ideas were understood and appropriated within the context of Hawaiian politics is not well known. This article extends scholarship demonstrating how in colonizing contexts, ideas about science could be mobilized as a moral resource and scientific societies could become distinct social formations. Specifically, the article shows how, during the pre-annexation period, the predominantly White and Hawaiian-born members of the Honolulu Social Science Association gathered in the performance of scientific modernity, with an implicit yet overarching political aim.     

“This Greater Issue of Light against Darkness”: Sereno Edwards Bishop,Missionary Religion,and the Hawaiian Islands, 1827–1909

The history of nineteenth‐century missions provide a fruitful field to explore the development of religious thought and practice in a secular setting. This article shows how the religious views of the clergyman and educator Sereno Edwards Bishop, born in Hawai‘i of American missionary parents, were shaped by his childhood among the mission community in Hawai‘i and by his American college education. These instilled in him a liberal approach to theology that was informed by a spiritually alert sense of Hawaiian geography and environment. Contrary to the notion that he cast his faith aside in addressing matters of wider social and political importance, Bishop emerges as someone who thought critically about mid‐nineteenth‐century Protestant Christianity, grounding his perspective on politics, society, and natural history in Hawai‘i according to his religious principles. Given Bishop’s specific intellectual and cultural heritage, it is difficult to subsume his perspective within broader narratives of American expansion; rather, both Pacific and mainland American elements shaped the thought of such mission‐descended figures.     

E. B. Tylor and the Problem of Primitive Culture

Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1832–1917) theory of survivals, or elements of the “primitive” or archaic past that continued to play an active part in the beliefs of the present day, hallmarks the Victorian effort to isolate and display what were thought to be the most developed features of the contemporary world. However, in focusing on what was outmoded in society, the theory of survivals brought primitive beliefs into an uncomfortable relationship with the beliefs of the present, threatening to disrupt the harmony of this conception. The resulting problems of recognition and understanding in the theory of survivals led Tylor finally to affirm a static and mechanical view of the continuity of cultures, in opposition to the radical, dynamic view with which he had been working until the publication in 1871 Tylor, E. B. 1871. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, Vol. 2, London: John Murray.  [Google Scholar] of Primitive Culture.