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.
Pioneering perspectives
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.
A treasury of knowledge
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
Chapter 1 presents a detailed examination of the Negro Education Grant of the 1830s, which provided ‘religious and moral education’ to the children of emancipated slaves. It analyses the educational landscape in Britain in order to contextualise the debates and discussions that led the instigation of the Negro Education Grant, particularly those debates that focused upon the term ‘liberal and comprehensive’. By focusing upon this term and imbuing it with their own meanings, numerous secretaries of evangelical missionary societies bounded together to assert their position as important partners for the Imperial government to work with to provide schooling to emancipated peoples. Schooling was not the only means by which evangelical missionary groups spread their message; however, it was the most amenable means by which they could collaborate with governments and become part of the colonial structure. The provision of missionary schooling was considered necessary to address the moral vacuum that was perceived to be left when the system of slavery was abolished in British colonies. Through arguing that they were the most apt providers of religious and moral education, Anglicans and Nonconformists increased their own standing in religious circles in Britain as their work was legitimised through collaboration with governments. Tellingly, the debates surrounding the Negro Education Grant did not include voices from those to be instructed under this system, which reflected the broader biases evident with the educational offerings of early nineteenth-century missionary societies towards transposing British educational ideas rather than incorporating local people’s expectations.
Nineteenth-century evangelical Protestant missionary groups commonly assumed that they were the most apt providers of education to non-Europeans in British colonies. Christian schooling was deemed imperative for modernising societies to withstand secularising forces. This significant study examines this assumption by drawing on key moments in the development of missionary education from the 1830s to the beginning of the twentieth century. The book is the first to survey the changing ideologies behind establishing mission schools across the spectrum of the British Empire. It examines the Negro Education Grant in the West Indies, the Aborigines Select Committee (British Settlements), missionary conferences in 1860 and 1910 as well as drawing on local voices and contexts from Southern Africa, British India and Sri Lanka to demonstrate the changing expectations for, engagement with and ideologies circulating around mission schools resulting from government policies and local responses. By the turn of the twentieth century, many colonial governments had encroached upon missionary schooling to such an extent that the symbiosis that had allowed missionary groups autonomy at the beginning of the century had morphed into an entanglement that secularised mission schools. The spread of ‘Western modernity’ through mission schools in British colonies affected local cultures and societies. It also threatened Christian religious moral authority, leading missionary societies by the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 to question the ambivalent legacy of missionary schooling, and to fear for the morality and religious sensibilities of their pupils, and indeed for morality within Britain and the Empire.
Chapter 5 examines the outcomes of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 and in particular the report of Commission III, which was dedicated to examining ‘Education in relation to the Christianisation of National Life’. It declared that the educational work of missionaries over the century had largely failed in its aims to create a new generation of Christians. As with the Liverpool conference, at Edinburgh there was a specific focus upon women’s education, including discussions on the need to provide women in African Protectorates with low-level manual training as a form of moral education. Ideas of adaptive education were drawn from American ideas of schooling for African-Americans from the American commissioners of the report, with the inclusion of these ideas in the Commission III’s report demonstrating internationally transposable notions of race, class and morality. The chapter examines the recommendations given to ensure that missionary groups would be able to maintain their position as the self-appointed most appropriate providers of education to non-Europeans in light of three major pressures on missionary schooling: the spread of Islam, the increasing instigation of national educational systems, which in turn side-lined missionary efforts, and, finally, the increase in nationalist sentiments often expressed through anti-Western, anti-missionary stances. Through analyses of the discussions at Edinburgh, the chapter illustrates the ever-present struggle to reconcile missionary and government ideals, made all the more difficult by the necessity to compromise ideals on both sides in the face of local realities and demands.
Chapter 4 focuses upon the Church Missionary Society in Sri Lanka, and by doing so explores the establishment of schools within this heterogeneous cultural, social and religious landscape. Through examining autobiographical writings of converts in Ceylon, the chapter explores the various roles Christian schooling played in influencing their life choices. Sri Lanka is a complex site where religious identities, castes and political identities were in constant flux. The chapter argues that in the framework of missionary modernity, morality, rather than academic aptitude, was the foremost quality that missionaries desired in their teachers. Yet for local people, the reasons to become teachers were complex and not just an expression of faith. In a second section, the chapter contrasts the relationship between government and Christian schools in Sri Lanka with examples in India. It argues that even under a liberal religious-equality model within a government system, as was practised in Sri Lanka, mission schools were progressively secularised over the century, partly due to the forces from outside and the demands of ‘modernisation’. In doing so, the chapter provides a framework in which to conceptualise government funding and inspection as a form of secularisation of mission schools.
After the abolition of slavery in British colonies, humanitarians in Britain turned their attention to the mistreatment of non-Europeans in British colonies, with a Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements) sitting from 1836 to 1837. This Committee was established during a time of intense debate on the morality of the British Empire, and on the fates of the millions of non-Europeans who were currently, and who would potentially come, under British rule. Within the report, a particular focus was placed on events in the Cape Colony and the current Xhosa Wars. The chapter examines in detail reference to schooling in the Select Committee Report and its broader context, and argues that in this Committee there was a significant yet subtle shift in emphasis from the term ‘religious and moral education’ used in the debates surrounding the Negro Education Grant to ‘religious instruction and education’. This change reflected the idea that the moral progress of non-Europeans was no longer the all-encompassing aim to be reached through Protestant education, rather that the term ‘education’ could be imbued or enhanced with skills that would be useful to current and future British settlements in the colonial world. The chapter demonstrates that a symbiotic relationship existed between government and Protestant missionary groups in providing schooling, but that the ultimate goals for both groups were subtly different.
This chapter presents the 1918–20 ‘moment’ in the British Empire between the First World War’s armistices of 1918 and the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. That moment, we argue, was a challenging and transformative time for the Empire. While British authorities successfully answered some of the post-war tests it faced, such as demobilisation, repatriation and fighting the widespread effects of the Spanish flu, the racial, social, political and economic hallmarks of its imperialism set the scene for a wide range of expressions of loyalties and disloyalties, and anticolonial movements alongside demands for more development and more opportunities immediately after the war as explored in the book’s chapters. The chapter defines the 1918–20 ‘moment’ and its characteristics as a crucial three-year period of transformation in the Empire, examining these years for the significant shifts in the imperial relationship that occurred, and as laying the foundation for later change. This chapter problematises the 1918–20 ‘moment’ within the field of what French scholars have dubbed sorties de guerre, that is, the transmuting period which follows a conflict, not as a return to a pre-war normalcy and status quo but to a phase of building an unknown future which must address the immediate consequences of the conflict, often resulting in profound societal changes.
In 1914, Henri Bourassa (1868–1952), editor of the influential Montreal daily Le Devoir, was unquestionably the dominant figure in French Canadian nationalism, ever since his resignation as an MP from the Liberal Party in 1899 over Canada’s participation in the Boer War. Though he criticised both Liberals and Tories over their imperialism and failure to uphold biculturalism in Canada, his nationalism embraced the new federation expanding since 1867. The internal division of Canada during the Great War, and Canada’s extensive participation, could be seen as failures of his undertakings. Headed by abbé Lionel Groulx (1878–1967) a new movement centred on the review L’Action française (1917), originally as an extension of Le Devoir, gradually emancipated itself from his vision, developing instead a Quebec-centred nationalism. From 1918, Groulx began to hint that the days of the British Empire were numbered and that this would be French Canada’s opportunity to become independent. Other nationalists openly took a position in favour of Quebec self-determination and Groulx attempted to federate left- and right-leaning nationalists in a common position statement favourable to sovereignty, with the collective work Notre avenir politique (1922). Groulx became the leading figure of Quebec nationalism throughout the inter-war period. A new French-Canadian nationalism centred on Quebec gradually imposed itself, as illustrated by the election of a new provincial party, the Union Nationale, in 1936. This evolution laid the foundations of the modern Quebec nationalism that came to dominate all provincial parties after 1960 and establish a new Québécois identity.
As the First World War ‘ended’, one of its most devastating legacies continued. The global spread of the Spanish influenza virus in 1918–19 had been facilitated by the mass movement of troops and other personnel around the world. This pandemic has traditionally been relegated to the footnotes of the First World War, and yet it killed more than both world wars combined. The most virulent wave of the pandemic struck in the autumn of 1918 and, in many belligerent countries, coincided with the signing of the Armistice. Across the British Empire, the dynamics between the pandemic and the end of the war varied between different imperial spaces. In Australia, a partially successful national quarantine led to international acclaim, and augmented the health-focused aspects of its developing national self-image. In other imperial spaces, however, the pandemic presented a challenge to national self-image. New Zealand failed to control the pandemic either within or outside of its shores, and its role as an imperial outpost in the South Pacific was jeopardised by its failure to enforce quarantine in Western Samoa during the outbreak. Yet, in indigenous imperial spaces the pandemic could facilitate change in the aftermath of the war. Indigenous Samoans, for example, utilised the pandemic to further the cause of their nascent national independence movement. Such examples illustrate how the Spanish flu pandemic provided unique opportunities and challenges for British imperial hegemony in the aftermath of the First World War.
One of New Delhi’s most iconic colonial monuments, India Gate, commemorates the war dead for the period from 1914 to 1919, rather than to 1918. This reflects the Indian Army’s overlapping roles in the First World War and the Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919). The latter conflict brought greater violence to the Indo-Afghan border and emboldened anticolonial campaigns. This was not the only continuity between war and ‘peace’. Most famously, General Reginald Dyer commanded Indian Army troops to open fire on an unarmed crowd at Amritsar in April 1919, killing hundreds. In addition to combating anticolonial rebellion domestically, the Indian Army also fought to support colonial rule in places such as Egypt, Iraq and Palestine. They did so not simply as a result of unwavering devotion to Britain or through financial necessity. The army cultivated devotion through acts such as funding soldiers’ pilgrimages to Muslim holy lands in Mecca and Medina, starting in 1919. Army officials hoped that this would encourage a pro-imperial version of pan-Islamic unity. The Nepali government cultivated British support by contracting Nepali soldiers to crush anticolonial rebellion in India. British officials responded by facilitating purification ceremonies for Nepali men who broke caste laws during overseas service. The Indian Army’s many post-war campaigns therefore emboldened anticolonial activism, helped to forge international political alliances, and enabled British officials to maintain tenuous imperial control around the world. South Asian soldiers played central roles in defining who could be considered an enemy or an ally of the colonial state.