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 bridge crossing the River Tay at Aberfeldy in Perthshire connects southern Scotland to the Highlands. It is an important piece of historic transport infrastructure. More than that, however, it is an architectural monument to the making of North Britain, built in the 1730s by British military engineers serving under General Wade to a design by leading Scottish architect William Adam. It marks the beginning of a process that through the next century transformed the Highlands from a geographically and culturally distinct place into the northern part of North Britain. There is a multicentred, multifaceted process of political, economic, and cultural colonisation that can be read into the relationship between landscape and built environment in this transformation process: military pacification brought forts, roads, bridges, and inns; land clearances removed indigenous peoples and introduced new settlement patterns and house forms; and, finally, cultural tourism brought hotels and shooting lodges. Drawing comparisons with colonial activities in Ireland and North America, this chapter will present the inns, farms, hotels, villages, roads, bridges, and harbours of the Scottish Highlands as interconnected acts in the expansion of the British frontier to the northern edge of the British Isles.
How was empire relevant to architecture and space in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London? Firstly, and most obviously, London was built on the profits of colonial trade and resource exploitation. Much of London’s employment involved either the processing of colonial raw materials or the servicing of the empire, through the supply of goods and services, including the administration of colonial government and the activities of engineers, surveyors, bankers, lawyers, and other professions focused on colonial development. The housing and provisioning of all who were employed in these ways generated multiplier effects for the everyday domestic economy. This chapter will place emphasis on the evidence for empire in London’s residential spaces: in the building of luxurious mansion flats which provided a suitably grand backcloth for some forms of imperial display, but more directly provided London pieds à terre for politicians and members of the professions administering and servicing the empire and for colonial servants returning on furlough or retirement; in the layout of suburbs with street and house names redolent of empire, some architectural types and details (bungalows, Indian-inspired domes, elaborately ornamented verandahs) attributable to colonial experience, and public and private gardens planted with exotic species originating in colonial exploration and trade; and even in slums which accommodated migrants and transients as well as dockworkers and their families. Planning concepts associated with the segregation of different land uses and socioeconomic (and, in practice, ethnic) groups can also be related to segregational practices first employed in Asia and Africa.
Is it possible to establish Georgian Dublin as a locus of architectural innovation within newly constituted histories of Britain’s ‘inner empire’? Reflecting on the reduced significance ascribed to eighteenth-century Dublin’s built heritage in modern British architectural histories, this chapter seeks to problematie the received wisdom concerning the intellectual exchange between a supposed centre (Britain) and its periphery (Ireland). Efforts to maintain the centrality of London in histories of British Palladianism have certainly proved problematic, not least when one considers that it failed to produce a significant public architecture; but the principal symptom of this subjective bias has been the deliberate diminishment, or even entire omission, of Irish buildings from its teleological narrative. (Nor has the acknowledgment of the ‘Britishness’ of Irish eighteenth-century architecture, by generations of historians in Ireland, affected an enduring revisionism in British scholarship.) Focusing on the historiographical reception of Dublin’s celebrated parliament house (1729–39), this chapter will consider the myriad problems posed by a building with conflicting national and cultural identities; at once a symbol of an emerging political confidence in Ireland during the early Georgian era, and simultaneously a paradigmatic example of enlightened British architectural tastes in the wake of the Hanoverian Succession.
This chapter charts the growing, diversifying circulation of the Dutch monarch’s image for different audiences and purposes across the early twentieth century. It discusses Queen Wilhelmina (r. 1898–1948) and Queen Juliana (r. 1948–80), portraits of whom played an important ceremonial role at government and viceregal occasions in the East Indies, and were also adapted in creative ways by different ethnic groups as effigies at pageants. In demonstrating how the queens’ portraits were used in imperial rituals, rather than simply attending to representation, this chapter addresses scholarship on royal tours, mass spectacle and empire that has to date overlooked the role of photography in forging connections between monarchs and their colonial subjects. The chapter assesses colonial audiences’ engagement with European monarchies beyond the parameters of the ‘royal tour’, which was actually uncommon in most empires other than British overseas possessions.
This chapter examines continuity and change in photographs of royal celebrations made by Dutch authorities during the long decolonisation of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia. It discusses the celebration of Queen Juliana in Dutch New Guinea (1948–62). It also presents evidence that, during the Dutch military actions (1945–50) that preceded Indonesia’s independence, royal celebrations were an important opportunity for Dutch soldiers to celebrate victories and claim territorial sovereignty for the Netherlands. Royal celebrations were also instrumental in the battle for civilian hearts and minds, particularly to demonstrate the benevolence of Dutch soldiers to Indonesians. This chapter reveals that Wilhelmina was not just a hero of the Second World War in the Netherlands, but also very much a soldiers’ queen in Indonesia during the dying days of the Dutch empire in Asia.
This chapter reveals how colonial subjects recorded their own participation in royal celebrations as amateur photographers, and collected mass-produced photographs of the Dutch monarchy, thus placing the East Indies and family events at the centre of historic, imperial occasions. It shows how family photography emerged as an important medium for diverse colonial populations to forge a cosmopolitan identity predicated on support for an institution that was still mostly parochial (a national monarchy) at the beginning of Wilhelmina’s reign in 1898, but emphatically international (in terms of an empire) by the 1940s, when Wilhelmina was in her maturity. It also explores the connections between the emergence of family photography and the popularisation of the Dutch monarchy during the 1930s, particularly through the marriage and childbearing of Crown Princess Juliana, when the image of the ‘ordinary’ monarchy first emerged.
This chapter analyses photographs of Wilhelmina’s subjects participating in koninginnedag festivals from both the East Indies and the Netherlands. Photographs of games and competitions, traditional dances adapted to new purposes and the distinctive costumes of folk and ethnic ‘types’ at royal celebrations appeared frequently in the photographs of European elites throughout the Dutch colonial world. The chapter explains the intellectual movements in ethnography and ‘folk studies’ that underpinned this photographic convergence in Wilhelmina’s lifetime, and the political role ascribed to the monarch as a benevolent unifying force that transcended geographical distance and racial difference. This chapter also attends to representations of the monarch’s body – that of a European, female king – to explain how photography mediated Wilhelmina’s and Juliana’s relationships to their subjects. In having themselves photographed wearing folk costumes, Dutch royals bodily identified with and mirrored the diversity they were expected to recognise in their Dutch subjects. By contrast, the queen never physically embodied the ethnic and religious diversity of her colonial subjects.
The personal association between Queen Wilhelmina and the Ethical Policy, a doctrine of liberal reform that she announced early in her reign (in 1901), is examined in this chapter for how it manifested in royal celebrations. At the start of her reign, lanterns and gaslights at royal pageants marked a continuation of centuries-old festival practices in both the East Indies and the Netherlands. However, the electrification of the Indies proceeded apace under Wilhelmina’s rule. This chapter uses published commemorative books, photographs taken by colonial officials who orchestrated festivals, and amateur private photographs to show how the electrification of the Indies was photographed on annual Queen’s Day celebrations and at other milestones of Wilhelmina’s reign. The spectacular uses of night photography in particular gave colonial photographers an opportunity to show how ‘modern’ the East Indies was, more so even than the Netherlands, and thus to celebrate the ‘progress’ made under the Ethical Policy. Photography articulated a complex association between modernisation, benevolent Dutch colonialism and the monarchy in ways that refused the peripheral status of the Indies relative to the metropole.
This chapter introduces Queen Wilhelmina, a monarch who never toured her colonies, yet was better known and celebrated there than any of her predecessors and thus represents perhaps the only truly imperial monarch in Dutch history. It examines the development of mass photography in the Netherlands East Indies (colonial Indonesia) during Wilhelmina’s reign (1898–1948). It was photography above all other media that ‘globalised’ the Dutch monarchy for colonial subjects in a way that enabled a wide range of her subjects, from Indigenous royals to ordinary people, to creatively respond to and interact with this important imperial institution.
Photographic subjects examines photography at royal celebrations during the
reigns of Wilhelmina (1898–1948) and Juliana (1948–80), a period spanning the
zenith and fall of Dutch rule in Indonesia. It is the first monograph in English
on the Dutch monarchy and the Netherlands’ modern empire in the age of mass and
amateur photography.
This book reveals how Europeans and Indigenous people
used photographs taken at Queen’s Day celebrations to indicate the ritual uses
of portraits of Wilhelmina and Juliana in the colonies. Such photographs were
also objects of exchange across imperial networks. Photograph albums were sent
as gifts by Indigenous royals in ‘snapshot diplomacy’ with the Dutch monarchy.
Ordinary Indonesians sent photographs to Dutch royals in a bid for recognition
and subjecthood. Professional and amateur photographers associated the Dutch
queens with colonial modernity and with modes of governing difference across an
empire of discontiguous territory and ethnically diverse people. The gendered
and racial dimensions of Wilhelmina’s and Juliana’s engagement with their
subjects emerge uniquely in photographs, which show these two women as female
kings who related to their Dutch and Indigenous subjects in different visual
registers.
Photographic subjects advances methods in the use of photographs
for social and cultural history, reveals the entanglement of Dutch and
Indonesian histories in the twentieth century, and provides a new interpretation
of Wilhelmina and Juliana as imperial monarchs. The book is essential for
scholars and students of colonial history, South-east Asian and Indonesian
studies, and photography and visual studies.