For over two decades, Manchester University Press has provided pioneering perspectives on imperial history. This collection offers a comprehensive exploration of the cultural encounters between colonisers and the colonised, highlighting power dynamics and identity constructions within empires.
The collection examines the production and organisation of colonial knowledge, analyses cultural encounters and power dynamics within empires, and provides insights into the construction of identity in colonial and imperial contexts, with contributions from leading scholars in the field.
| Key series |
| Studies in imperialism |
| Theory for a Global Age |
| Postcolonial International Studies |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 10 |
| 2023/4 titles | 31 |
| 1986-2022 titles | 201 |
| Total collection | 251 |
| Keywords |
| Global South |
| Caribbean |
| Gender |
| Slavery |
| Indigenous communities |
| Empire |
| Religion |
| Science |
| Ireland |
| Middle East |
| Race |
| Borders |
| Commerce |
| Ecology |
| Thema subject categories |
| Anthropology |
| Asian history |
| Australasian and Pacific history |
| British Empire |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| Literary studies |
| Migration, immigration and emigration |
SDG coverage
Imperialism and colonial history collection
Emigration formed a cornerstone of the GFS’s imperial work. In 1883 the GFS established the Department for Members Emigrating to ensure the safe passage of girls and young women travelling between various parts of the empire. The previous chapter examined how whiteness was central to imaginings of settler colonial societies, and this chapter considers how the GFS tried to make these imaginings a reality through its emigration programmes and the building up of settler societies. The chapter begins by outlining the wider contexts in which the GFS’s emigration programmes emerged and situates their development in relation to similar emigration schemes for girls. It then traces the different motives that informed the development of the GFS’s programmes. Child rescue and emigration organisations argued for the necessity of removing girls from the perceived dangers of poverty and urban life in England to the more wholesome environment of the colonies. Girls also provided valuable labour to colonial societies and were integral in making the empire white by ensuring the construction of English households abroad. Despite the high demand for emigrants in settler colonies, the GFS and other emigration organisations faced myriad difficulties, which were rooted in broader class and racial anxieties and specifically concerns about the whiteness of emigrants and white prestige in colonial societies. These challenges also reveal the competing, rather than complementary, objectives among emigration organisers, settlers, and girl migrants and fault lines within emigration programmes and the settler colonial project.
The conclusion provides an overview of the organisation’s history since the interwar years and the ways that it has adapted – and not – to broader social changes. Following the Second World War the GFS, like Britain, struggled to find its place and redefine itself in a post-imperial world. It shifted its imperial work to focus on missionaries and developed a World Council, its own version of a Commonwealth, to connect its branches worldwide. Yet it still grappled with systemic problems, including the perception that it was an outdated organisation. The organisation continues to exist today with around twenty thousand members in branches throughout the world, but it looks very different from the GFS of 1875. The nucleus of power within the GFS has shifted from England, and branches in Africa account for over 70 per cent of the GFS worldwide membership. As the GFS prepares to mark its sesquicentennial in 2025, it is confronted with old and new questions, including its relationship with the Anglican Church and whether single-gender organisations are still relevant. The Black Lives Matter movement led the GFS to reflect on racism within the organisation. The conclusion reflects on how the legacies of colonialism continue to shape girls’ lives and frame the contemporary politics of girlhood.
This chapter focuses on India and the GFS’s efforts to reform two groups that provoked considerable anxiety among colonial governments and the GFS: poor white and multiracial girls. These girls seemingly threatened ideas of whiteness and purity by complicating binary racial distinctions and raising the spectre of racial degeneration. The GFS instituted training programmes for these girls to raise their status and thereby avert the supposed degeneration of the white race, but these programmes encountered problems and resistance, revealing fault lines over race within the GFS. The GFS encouraged its members to think of themselves as belonging to ‘a very large family’ and an ‘Imperial sisterhood’, but not all girls were welcome or equal members in this sisterhood. The GFS presented itself as an organisation that transcended racial divisions, but debates over the membership of non-European girls, especially in India and South Africa, revealed the contradictions in such pronouncements. Because the organisation relied upon the support of Indian and African girls, it begrudgingly admitted them but simultaneously worked to segregate girls and deprive their branches of resources, ultimately leading girls to leave the organisation altogether. These actions demonstrate that girls were not passive participants in the GFS but actively shaped the society in accordance with their interests, sometimes disrupting the organisers’ plans in the process.
While girls are often consigned to the shadows in studies of colonialism, Empire’s daughters uncovers the ways in which girls and ideas of girlhood were central to the construction of colonial identities and societies and ideas of whiteness. Girls were heralded as empire builders and, especially during times of imperial uncertainty, were crucial to the creation and maintenance of class, gender, and racial hierarchies. Yet girls’ involvement in the empire was anything but straightforward. They not only supported – directly and indirectly – racialised systems of colonial power but also resisted them. To explore these complexities of girls’ participation in the empire, Empire’s daughters examines the Girls’ Friendly Society, an organisation that emerged in late Victorian Britain and developed into a global society with branches throughout the empire. The book charts the society’s origins and growth and its later decline in the interwar era. It also explores how, through its multifaceted imperial education and emigration programmes, the society constructed ideas of girlhood, race, and empire that then circulated globally. The book employs a multi-sited framework that examines girlhood in different areas of the empire, including Britain, India, South Africa, and Australia, and utilises a range of sources, including correspondences, scrapbooks, photographs, and newsletters, to provide new insights into girls’ experiences of and engagement with colonialism. Through this study of the Girls’ Friendly Society, Girlhood and whiteness explores the micropolitics of colonialism and whiteness and argues that understandings of colonialism remain incomplete without considerations of girls and girlhood.
The GFS developed extensive imperial education programmes to generate interest in the empire and strengthen girls’ sense of patriotism. GFS organisers hoped these activities would encourage girls, specifically white girls, to emigrate to settler colonies or undertake missionary work. In fulfilling these aims, the GFS became instrumental in the creation and circulation of knowledge about the empire, girlhood, and whiteness. The second chapter begins by providing an overview of the GFS’s education programmes before proceeding to more focused studies of four examples of these efforts: newsletters, pageants and plays, scrapbooks, and penfriend programmes. Newsletters perpetuated myths that colonisation was a civilising and necessary process, white girls were superior to girls of other races, and the settler colonies were terra nullius. Imperial pageants and plays, which featured girls in blackface and brownface, reveal how white girls actively engaged in the performance of imperial, racial, and gendered identities. In scrapbooks and correspondences, girls could share their perspectives and experiences, act as experts about colonial life, and instruct others about colonial history and geography. While scrapbooks, pageants, and letters provide rare moments when white girls emerge from the shadows of the archive and are visible, they marginalise people of colour. Through these cultural forms the GFS thus constructed and projected imaginings of whiteness and idealised visions of colonial societies that obscured the violence inherent in colonisation.
The introduction provides background information about the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS) and articulates how studying this organisation can enrich understandings of gender, childhood, whiteness, and colonialism. The introduction situates this book in relation to existing scholarship about childhood history, whiteness, youth organisations, colonial cultures, and migration. Youth organisations can provide singular insights into how the British understood their empire and their imperial visions and ambitions, and although robust scholarship exists about contemporary organisations, most notably the Girl Guides, comparatively little research has been done on the GFS. The introduction provides an overview of book’s methodology and its multi-sited framework, which enables broader comparative analyses about the diverse experiences of colonial girlhood. It also reflects on the challenges of researching girlhood and specifically of finding girls’ voices in the archive. The introduction draws attention to key themes that will re-emerge throughout the book, including contested definitions of girlhood, and provides an overview of the chapters.
The first chapter analyses how concerns about gender, race, and class converged in the foundation of the GFS in 1875. Using memoirs from Mary Elizabeth Townsend and other founders of the organisation as well as GFS meeting minute books and newsletters and leaflets, this chapter describes the formation and structure of the organisation and situates the GFS within broader social purity, child rescue, and imperialist movements in the late Victorian era. Purity was the guiding and defining principle of the GFS’s wide-ranging work, in England and the empire. The GFS required that its members be sexually pure, but this stipulation was rooted in broader concerns about social and racial purity. The fervent commitment to ensuring the purity of the white race – and by extension its supposed superiority – justified the GFS’s social reform work among the working classes in England. Organisers particularly targeted domestic servants for membership in the GFS and sought to solve ‘the servant crisis’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by training girls in household skills and acting as an employment agency that connected prospective servants with employers. The GFS also used purity to justify extending its reach in the empire through the establishment of colonial branches and missionary programmes. Yet even in its early years, the GFS was troubled by debates about key issues, including the age and qualifications of its members and its central rule on girls’ purity, and these fault lines within the organisation would grow more pronounced in the succeeding decades.
The last chapter explores the decline of the organisation in the interwar years. It outlines key factors that contributed to its waning influence, including its ageing leadership, competition with other organisations, disagreements with the Anglican Church, and difficulties adapting to social changes and appealing to the modern girl. Debates over the possible amendment of the organisation’s central rule on purity, which stipulated that all members be virgins, exacerbated fractures within the GFS and crystallised how out of touch the organisation had become to girls and their concerns. The organisation clung to its Victorian foundations and models of girlhood, even as that Victorian social order was being uprooted during the First World War and interwar years. The decline of the organisation also coincided with the growth of national sentiment and unrest in many regions of the empire, especially India. Disputes within the organisation mirrored growing divisions within the empire, as members in the colonies increasingly challenged the colonial, hierarchical structure of the organisation. Although India had once been heralded as ‘the G.F.S. Jewel’, the GFS decided to cease its operations in the area in 1933, which was the result of systemic problems within the organisation and served as a harbinger the GFS’s decline throughout the empire. This decline represented an increasing scepticism and disillusionment with the GFS’s professed commitment to caring for, preserving, and protecting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’.
This chapter tries to assess the contribution that Walcott made to cricket as a player, administrator and global icon, with particular reference to his role in challenging racial and social inequalities. It concludes that Walcott was one of the most important figures the game has ever seen, not just in the sphere of West Indies cricket, but in the game as a whole.
This first biography of Sir Clyde Walcott takes a detailed look at the life and achievements of one of the greatest cricketers of all time. For the West Indies in the 1950s, Walcott was part of the legendary ‘3Ws’ batting triumvirate with Everton Weekes and Frank Worrell, helping to give West Indies cricket a new identity separate from its colonial past. After Test cricket he became a prominent cricket administrator, managing the great West Indies teams that ruled the world in the 1980s. A vocal supporter of using cricket to apply pressure on the South African apartheid regime, in 1992 he became chairman of the International Cricket Council – the first non-white person in that influential role. Shining a light on Walcott’s role in effecting change through the vehicle of cricket, this book also shows how he contributed to dramatic social change in British Guiana (after independence, Guyana) as cricket and social welfare organiser for the country’s sugar estates from 1954 to 1970, bringing about improvements in the living conditions and self-esteem of poor Indo-Guyanese plantation workers while promoting the emergence of a number of world-class cricketers from a previously neglected corner of the Caribbean.