Doing digital history

Kenya’s white settlers have long captivated observers. They are alternately celebrated and condemned, painted as romantic pioneers or hedonistic bed-hoppers or crude racists. If we wish to better understand Kenya’s tortured history, however, we must examine settlers not as caricatures, but as people inhabiting a unique historical moment. We must ask, what animated their lives? What comforted them and what unnerved them, to whom did they direct love, and to whom violence? The Souls of White Folk takes seriously – though not uncritically – what settlers said, how they viewed themselves and their world. It argues that the settler soul was composed of a series of interlaced ideas: settlers equated civilization with a (hard to define) whiteness; they were emotionally enriched through claims to paternalism and trusteeship over Africans; they felt themselves constantly threatened by Africans, by the state, and by the moral failures of other settlers; and they daily enacted their claims to supremacy through rituals of prestige, deference, humiliation, and violence. The book explains how settlers could proclaim real affection for their African servants, tend to them with intimate medical procedures, as well as whip, punch and kick them – for these were central to the joy of settlement, and the preservation of settlement. It explains why settlers could be as equally alarmed by an African man with a fine hat, Russian Jews, and a black policeman, as by white drunkards, adulterers, and judges – all posed dangers to white prestige.

The military occupation of Egypt exposed the British government to charges of self-interest and the betrayal of Britain's liberal political principles. This book is a comprehensive portrait of the British colony in Egypt, which also takes a fresh look at the examples of colonial cultures memorably enshrined in Edward W. Said's classic Orientalism. It presents a study that takes Edward Said's theory of colonial culture as a first reference and follows his method of analysing various British cultural products that involved some sort of cultural exchange. British residence in Egypt was facilitated by commercial treaties, known as the 'Capitulations'. The idea of Britain's 'civilising mission' had become justification for the repression of Egypt's liberty. Arguing that Said's analysis offered only the dominant discourse in imperial and colonial narratives, the book uses private papers, letters, memoirs, as well as the official texts, histories and government reports, to reveal both dominant and muted discourses. While imperial sentiment set the standards and sealed the ruling caste culture image, the investigation of colonial sentiment reveals a diverse colony in temperament and lifestyles, often intimately rooted in the Egyptian setting. British high commissioner Sir Miles Lampson's interventions in Egyptian domestic politics marked a momentous turning point in imperial history by spurring extremist nationalism. The interwar time of uncertainty witnessed a see-sawing of the imperialistic and the liberal or internationalist impulses.

This book talks about the mass displacement of civilians, estimated to be 14 to 15 million, in the twentieth-century Europe during the First World War. It looks at the causes and consequences of the refugee crisis and its aftermath, and the attempts to understand its significance. Key sites of displacement extended from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, East Prussia, the Russian Empire, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Serbia. The German army's occupation of Belgium, France, Poland and Lithuania prompted the mass flight of refugees, as did Russia's invasion of East Prussia in 1914. Jewish, Ruthenian and Polish civilians in the Habsburg Empire fled their homes or were deported by the military to distant locations. Following Italy's attack on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the Habsburg authorities ordered around 100,000 Slovenian subjects of the empire to leave. The Austrian and Bulgarian invasion of Serbia brought about a humanitarian catastrophe as civilians and the remnants of the Serbian army sought safety elsewhere. However, mass flight of civilian refugees did not begin in 1914 nor did it come to an end in 1918. Muslim refugees fled to the relative safety of Anatolia in order to escape violent persecution by Bulgarian and other forces during the Balkan Wars on 1912-13. There were complex movements of population between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey before 1914. The complex process of repatriation and resettlement affected soldiers and civilians alike and rarely took place in stable or peaceful circumstances.