For over two decades, Manchester Studies in Imperialism has been a trailblazer in the realm of imperial history. Positioned firmly at the forefront, this series has illuminated the annals of history and transformed our understanding of empire.
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The Studies in Imperialism series has embarked on a transformative journey, reshaping not only British history but also the vast landscape of imperial histories. It has boldly expanded boundaries, delving into uncharted territories, and shining a light on subjects that were once overlooked. More importantly, it has masterfully unveiled the intricate and inseparable relationships between these domains.
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Within the pages of Manchester Studies in Imperialism lies a treasure trove of scholarly exploration. It unveils the rich tapestry of cultural encounters between colonisers and the colonised, shedding light on the intricate web of power that flows through the production and organisation of colonial knowledge. It unravels the complex construction of identity, both at the heart and on the peripheries of empire.
2025 Manchester Studies in Imperialism
The conclusion reflects on the wider lessons to be drawn from the example of Irish, Scottish and Welsh involvement in the English East India Company from c.1690 to c.1820. The emphasis is placed on how these societies, despite forming part of the British Empire’s ‘metropolitan core’, can be seen as exemplars of ‘comparatively disadvantaged’, ‘poor’ Europe. They provide evidence of how areas lacking large reserves of monetary capital sought to exploit early modern globalisation and expansion. In this way their example can contribute to wider debates on the nature of European expansion and colonialism and the basis of proto-globalisation.
The commercial activities of traders operating on their own private account under licence from the English East India Company was one of the most dynamic sectors of the emerging colonial economy. While there is some understanding of the prominence of Scots in this ‘country trade’ after 1750, the role of other metropolitan provincials is far less well understood. This chapter surveys and compares trends in Irish, Scottish and Welsh involvement in the private trade sector. As in the civil service, military and medical areas, diversity and divergence marked out the profile of the three national groups. Scots were disproportionately present in the key free merchant and free mariner levels of the country trade. By the early nineteenth century they formed a substantial minority percentage of the overall British and Irish free-trading community. By comparison the Welsh and more especially Irish involvement remained relatively underdeveloped, an outcome that impaired Irish society’s capacity to fully exploit one whole hemisphere of the empire. The chapter considers the tendency for the Welsh and Irish to appear in greater numbers in the administrative and legal services that developed in the main presidency settlements. Also analysed are the international remittance networks that stretched across the whole of Asia and back to Europe. These ephemeral but vitally important connections demonstrate the eclectic, transnational nature of the country trade but also the ongoing importance of kinship, regional and national identities.
The book is a comparative analysis of Scotland, Ireland and Wales’s participation in the English East India Company between c.1690 and c.1820. It explains the increasing involvement of individuals and networks from these societies in the London-based corporation which controlled contact between the early modern British and Irish Isles and one hemisphere of world trade. Scottish, Irish, and Welsh evidence is used to consider wider questions on the origins, nature and consequences of the early modern phase of globalisation, sometimes referred to as ‘proto-globalisation’. The book contributes to such debates by analysing how these supposedly ‘poorer’ regions of Europe relied on migration as an investment strategy to profit from empire in Asia. Using social network theory and concepts of human capital it examines why the Scots, Irish and Welsh developed markedly different profiles in the Company’s service. Chapters on the administrative elite, army officers and soldiers, the medical corps and private traders demonstrate consistent Scottish over-representation, uneven Irish involvement and consistent Welsh under-representation. Taken together they explore a previously underappreciated cycle of human capital that involved departure to Asia, the creation of colonial profits, and the return back of people and their fortunes to Britain and Ireland. By reconceptualising the origins and the consequences of involvement in the Company, the study will be of interest to historians of early modern Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Britain, the East India Company and the early phases of British imperialism in Asia.
The introduction considers the value of Irish, Scottish and Welsh perspectives on early British imperialism in Asia between c.1690 c.1820. It argues that this framing enables global, East India Company, British, Irish and local histories to be blended in new ways. Decentring metropolitan society in this manner mirrors the historiographic trend towards collapsing boundaries between the ‘overseas’, empire and the ‘domestic core’. Shifting attention towards the less financially affluent areas of the British and Irish Isles allows models of early modern Europe’s expansion to be tested in fresh ways. Defined here as the ‘metropolitan provinces’ of the British and Irish Isles, the chronology and method of Scottish, Irish and Welsh involvement in one hemisphere of British expansion remains understudied. This is especially the case when compared with the Atlantic world. Recovering the extent, timing and consequences of Irish, Scottish and Welsh links to Asia fills a significant lacuna in the early modern histories of all three countries. These societies also provide case studies of ‘semi-peripheries’ associated with World Systems theory or the ‘comparative disadvantaged Europe’ framework used in ‘Great Divergence’ models. They do this by enabling consideration of how ‘poor’ Europe – meaning those societies without large reserves of venture capital – used human and social forms of wealth to access globalising forms of colonialism. Having defined these proxy forms of wealth as ‘human capital’, the final section of the introduction considers the role of oceanic social networks (meso-networks) in mobilising such assets.
After c.1750 the English East India Company’s military institutions became the fastest growth sector in terms of new employment prospects in Asia. Exploring the ways in which Irish, Scottish and Welsh society engaged with this corporate–military complex provides a case study of the use of different forms of human capital. Commissioned personnel are conceptualised as ‘high-value human capital’, while rank and file recruits are conceived of as ‘low-value’. After c.1750 Irish society became a significant source of both high-value officers, drawn from Protestant families in Ulster and Leinster, and low-value ordinary soldiers. By the early nineteenth century the Irish share of ordinary manpower was regularly between 40 and 55 percent. Wales, by contrast, supplied very few of either type of personnel. Scottish society exported greater numbers of high-value officers, supplying over 2,000 between c.1750 and 1810. A noticeable feature of these different patterns of engagement is that after c.1780, while Irish officer numbers continued to expand, the country’s overall share dropped from around 20 percent to around 13 percent by 1800. By contrast, the profile of Scots officers remained constant between c.1750 and 1813 with around 20 percent of all commissioned personnel. Military service constituted a form of enterprise. Senior Irish officers were especially prominent in the early decades of the Company’s ‘predatory’ expansion (1750s–1780s). Looting, prize money and army contracts enabled fifty such officers to accrue over £1 million. Scottish returns were more broadly distributed with 145 officers securing over £1.7 million.
The chapter analyses the return phase of the cycle of human capital. It charts the arrival back in Britain and Ireland of personnel and capital and what impact these made upon political, economic and social factors across Wales, Ireland and Scotland. In the area of politics, profits made in the eastern half of the Empire began influencing electoral developments by the 1760s. However, overall, the impact was uneven, with only small numbers of Welsh and Irish constituencies affected compared to the more substantial presence of East India Company wealth in politics in Scotland. The scale of overall Scots, Irish and Welsh profits reflected the different profiles inside the Company and its associated free-trade economies. Over £5 million can be traced for 345 Scots, with ninety-two elite Irish sojourners securing over £2.1 million. These amounts demonstrate the effectiveness of human capital in enriching conventionally ‘poor’ societies. The chapter considers the ways in which imperial wealth was reabsorbed into society through processes of estate purchasing, agrarian and manufacturing improvements and lending. With so many more Scots involved in the civil service, merchant marine, military and in private trade, the impact was more intense and regionally dispersed in Scotland. Twenty-one estates have been identified has having been purchased in Wales, sixty-eight in Ireland and 347 in Scotland. These differences partly reflect greater Scottish involvement and the more accessible nature of land records. The chapter concludes with a series of case studies showing the use of Asia-derived wealth in civic and economic improvements.
Looking at European developments from 2017 to 2019, the Afterword situates the volume among the resurgent interest in questions of contested histories, calls for restitution, and the resurgence of provenance research. It argues that given the varied ways European nations are addressing questions of colonial collections, it seems contradictory that the collections of military museums are seemingly absent from the debate. The chapter consequently considers the affective values of objects, and the symbolic nature of return, arguing that there is a distinction to objects in UK military collections, linked to the idea of ‘sentiment’. Looking again at the conflict highlighted in the Introduction, it addresses two initiatives in 2018 in the UK which discussed the 1868 capture of the fortress at Maqdala and two items, again linked to Emperor Tewodros II, which over time have troubled their national custodians. It considers how such questions were addressed through display at the Victoria and Albert Museum and links this to the National Army Museum’s gesture of returning hair samples linked to Emperor Tewodros. Comparing these two initiatives it seeks to understand the historical moment in which such discussions, and therefore the issues addressed in Dividing the Spoils, can be more widely understood.
The later years of the Victorian era saw a series of ‘small wars’ and large battles conducted in Africa. This essay analyses two of these taking place in successive years (1897 and 1898): the Benin Punitive Expedition in the riverine creeks of south-eastern Nigeria and the Battle of Omdurman in the deserts of Sudan. In spite of their clear imperial motivations, in both cases military engagements were justified as defensible retaliation for the actions of what were represented as callous rulers. Yet the two conflicts otherwise contrast sharply in scale, in how they were reported, what was acquired by way of booty and in the ultimate fate of what was brought back from each. Some objects were judged appropriate to the royal collections, others to the national collections or smaller military museums, with significant numbers shifting between them. Each relocation, it is argued, represents a different commodification. The complex range of divergent object biographies is discussed, exploring how some have retained an enduring status as trophies while others have taken on a new personhood beyond the circumstances of their original acquisition.
This chapter contextualises the way collecting from military campaigns can be viewed as the acquisition of trophies parallel to the trophy collecting of hunting. From the eighteenth century onwards, hunting and shooting were seen as the image of war and were considered essential training for campaigning. Hunting produced natural history trophies which became a central collecting interest for museums, messes, clubs and private homes. The collecting of ethnographic trophies was closely related to this phenomenon in contemporary understanding, as part of a comprehensive approach to collecting the natural history of the world and its peoples. Colonial military campaigning was often associated with hunting expeditions and trophy collecting of both sorts took place. In the nineteenth century colonial campaigning and hunting stepped up its incidence and geographical range. Improvements in transport technology and auction-house infrastructures and advertising facilitated the dispersal of such materials. This chapter discusses the significance and meaning of such collecting in several ways: for the development of imperial ideologies, for the arousal of popular interests, and for the emergence of natural historical, ethnographic, anthropological and ideological concerns. It also examines how it came to be significant for the instruction of a wider audience, becoming part of imperial propaganda.
This chapter examines how the National Army Museum, in the course of a major redevelopment, set about creating the new ‘Insight’ gallery to reflect the British Army’s historical presence around the world. Artefacts collected by British soldiers while serving in West Africa, the Panjab, Egypt and the Sudan were chosen for the first redisplay. The ‘Insight’ gallery highlights how artefacts were taken, for instance as battlefield loot or deliberately to deprive conquered peoples of the symbols of political power. In advancing new interpretations, the museum wished to demonstrate the relevance of the past to the present, and to that end organised workshops with community groups within the UK – Sikh, Ghanaian and Sudanese – in order to discuss their responses to the museum’s collections. This led to the reinterpretation of collections with the museum, in particular through reading inscriptions, which reveal entirely new provenance information, or alternative identifying materials and techniques. These collaborative discussions elicited various, and sometimes conflicting interpretations, of the collections and recommendations as to how they should be displayed. The results of this work can be found in the current display through audio-visual interpretation.