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
The countries of the British Empire at large became contingent sites of inter-racial contact and segregation, migration and ‘cosmopolitanism’, unrest and surveillance during the First World War. As belligerent soldiers and prisoners of war moved up and down the interstices of empire, their cohabitation in the tense space of post-war colonies gave rise to a variety of responses in their personal writings. This chapter analyses the fashioning of ‘colonial agency’ in the British Empire against the backdrop of the end of the First World War. Reading archival documents of private writings by British soldiers who were still posted in India, colonial Burma, Mesopotamia and North Africa between 1918 and 1920, it examines how these men performed colonial agency and imperial hegemony in their daily duties; how they observed the landscape and the (colonial) picturesque; how they recorded their interactions with colonial non-white soldiers as the latter demobilised; and how their imperial gaze permeated their othering of colonial subjects and their negotiations with the colonial space. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the hybridity in the volatile spaces of post-war colonial states rendered it necessary for the British soldier to refashion and perform colonial agency.
Transitioning out of the First World War was a massive undertaking for all belligerents, including for Britain and its empire. From armies, to economies and war cultures, people across the Empire had to demobilise. But demobilising could not simply be a matter of undoing what had been done. The war had changed many aspects of the imperial project, strengthening the Empire’s prerogatives and structures in some regards, while at the same time challenging its unity and direction. There was no returning to a pre-war world: that world had disappeared.
During the course of the nineteenth century, millions of Germans left their homeland to settle throughout the world. While most went towards the Americas, hundreds of thousands moved to Britain and its Empire, those with agricultural and working-class backgrounds as well as elites. By 1914, despite rising Germanophobia as the First World War approached, the migrants remained an integrated group. This chapter demonstrates how the development of a Germanophobic ideology, emanating from London but present throughout British possessions in an equally virulent manner, had a devastating impact upon the German communities in the aftermath of the First World War. The racist ideology meant that Germans faced a combination of draconian measures in the form of internment, property confiscation and deportation. The chapter focuses upon the last of these, demonstrating that, while expulsions took place throughout the war, especially against women, the ‘extirpation – root and branch and seed – of German control and influence from the British Empire’, as put forward by the London-based Germanophobic pressure group the British Empire Union, became imperial policy. It examines the marginalisation and elimination of Germans in the British Empire at the end of the First World War. This elimination became total in some cases (such as India) and partial in others (such as Great Britain). The chapter demonstrates how the plight of the Germans at the end of the First World War fits into the wider picture of minority persecution during the era of the First World War as empires collapsed.
This book explores a particular 1918–20 ‘moment’ in the British Empire’s history, 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 they faced, such as demobilisation, repatriation and fighting the widespread effects of the Spanish flu, the racial, social, political and economic hallmarks of their imperialism set the scene for a wide range of expressions of loyalties and disloyalties, and anticolonial movements. The book documents and conceptualises this 1918–20 ‘moment’ and its characteristics as a crucial three-year period of transformation for and within the Empire, examining these years for the significant shifts in the imperial relationship that occurred, and as laying the foundation for later change in the imperial system.
On 26 October 1920, in the comfort of the offices of the Colonial Office, Leo Amery, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, informed a Greek Cypriot deputation that the government was not prepared to cede Cyprus to Greece – a policy called enosis. Amery had in fact made such an announcement in the House of Commons on 1 July 1920 and repeated it on 15 November in light of his meeting with the deputation. In the aftermath of the Armistice a debate ensued across various departments, and occasionally in the public in the UK, over whether or not to cede Cyprus to Greece. This chapter explores the failure of the enosis policy from all possible angles and from the varying positions of the different players, including the Cypriot peasant and lower classes. Ultimately, the enosis demand failed because it was not in fact a movement, with no widespread or even limited support from the broader population. There was little pressure on imperialists from the UK, Greece or Cyprus, and the demand for enosis was weak, illegitimate and contradictory; thus the retention of the island for dubious future strategic gain was hardly questioned.
Despite the centenary’s increasing effect on the literature of the Middle Eastern theatre of the war, the transitional 1918–20 moment still struggles to fit into traditional chronologies of the First World War and the history of Middle Eastern mandates. This chapter seeks to unite these two overlapping areas of research, focusing on the crucial years that contributed to the shaping of the modern Middle East. When the partition of the Ottoman Empire scenario ultimately prevailed, the dream of a secure land link between Egypt and India was no longer a chimera. Nevertheless, this invaluable asset for British imperial strategy required a coherent if not unified Middle Eastern policy that had to combine British war commitments with their own interests. The period 1918–20 was precisely the time when most of the significant guidelines – territorial delimitations, (in)direct administration, ‘sharifian solution’ and air power – were initiated and debated. This chapter explores these policies in their infancy in order to understand the war-induced transformation of most of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into mandates. Following the ‘Arab Awakening’, the emergence of self-determination principles and the birth of the League of Nations, Britain’s early attempt to administrate the conquered territories did not remain unchallenged. Whereas some of the local population were fighting in the war, others quickly defied the new ruler.
The experience of demobilised British and Dominion/colonial troops was often unpleasant, sometimes frustrating and occasionally dangerous. Many thousands of troops waited for long periods before they could be repatriated. At times, impatience and frustration boiled over into physical violence, riots and fatalities in repatriation camps. The protracted, enforced proximity in the camps of groups of soldiers from different parts of the Empire led to serious incidents, as did contact between troops awaiting repatriation and local populations, and between demobilised soldiers looking for work and British colonial subjects in local populations. Within the broader context of repatriation, this chapter looks in turn at examples of the difficult material conditions in which troops were required to live while waiting to go home; at various administrative and political factors which aggravated these difficulties; and at tensions generated between the British and colonial populations involved. The main objective of the chapter is to investigate official attitudes and policy regarding imperial troops and subjects and, wherever possible, the attitudes of the latter towards Britain. It also explores the intra-imperial dimension of this antagonism, especially its racial/racialist component. The vast, complicated repatriation operation, with the quasi-incarceration of many troops, created hostile contexts and environments, demonstrated clear intra-imperial tensions, and generated or exacerbated inter-racial problems – not least in the way British treatment of Dominion or colonial subjects and Britain’s attitudes to race collided with her previously trumpeted war aims.
Since the late nineteenth century, the British monarch was the constitutional head and cultural symbol of Greater Britain, a spiritual nexus providing unity and identity to a worldwide community of Britons. With the advent of decolonisation, however, republicanism emerged as a disruptive force that swept the British imperial world. This chapter sheds light on how monarchism and republicanism was perceived among white anglophone communities during the republican referendums in South Africa (1960) and Rhodesia (1969). These events marked the first and second time the British monarchy was dissolved by whites by popular vote and, as such, signalled bad tidings for the future of Britishness as a global civic idea. In these contexts, the chapter argues, republicanism served as a tool to entrench white domination and thereby wrong-foot the logic of decolonisation. Ultimately, it shows how the republican question was caught up in the processes of decolonisation, new nationalism and the break-up of Greater Britain.
In 1967 the British government announced that, starting in the 1967–-68 academic year, there would be different tuition fees for ‘home’ and ‘overseas’ students at British universities and colleges. This policy required drawing a clear distinction between those who belonged in Britain and those who did not, and highlighted significant confusion and misunderstanding about oOverseas sStudents. This chapter explores the shifting sands in the way that overseas students were understood. It particularly examines how overseas students were being racialised by both supporters and critics of the new fees as they perpetuated stereotypes of black people, and black students as poor, destitute, and in need of British assistance.
How did the end of empire affect the projection of British identities overseas? British decolonisation is conventionally understood in terms of the liquidation of the colonial empire in the decades after the Second World War. But it also entailed simultaneous transformations to the self-representation of peoples and cultures all over the world, variously described as British, symbolised by the eclipse of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’. Originally coined by Charles Dilke’s 1868 travelogue of the same name, Greater Britain enjoyed widespread currency throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before falling into disuse from the 1930s. But Greater British modes of thought, feeling and action persisted into the second half of the twentieth century, becoming embroiled in the global upheavals of imperial decline. Over a remarkably short time span, the ideas, assumptions and networks that had sustained an uneven and imperfectly imagined British world dissolved under the weight of the empire’s precipitate demise. Although these patterns and perspectives have been explored across a range of specific local and national contexts, this collection is the first to examine the wider mesh of interlocking British subjectivities that unravelled at empire’s end.