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 Seven analyses the use of visual images to reflect changing mentalities within convent orders in India that were partly the product of transnational influence, as well as Indian national politics as the twentieth century progressed. The new medium of photography, and imagery conveyed through textual representations, were adopted by these orders from the early twentieth century onwards as primary avenues to disseminate their message. Though still located outside the Indian cultural domain, these images showed tangible shifts from ‘seeing’ the East as a cultural curio to imagery that symbolised, instead, cultural transfer across racial lines – indicating that Loreto, in particular, was no longer a feature of the raj as the tide went out on empire in 1947. In the 1950s and 1960s, new vistas were in view: showing cultural Roman Catholic acclimatisation with the Puja, and also displaying new intelligence about a vibrant diaspora of former students elsewhere in India or abroad.
This chapter examines the interwar British Empire exhibitions to show how the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland each used display to champion their global agendas and distinct relationships to the British Empire. Northern Ireland visualised its loyalty and union with the United Kingdom, whereas the Free State championed its independence and emphasised its separation from the imperial project. In the exhibitions of the 1920s, the image of Ireland was dominated by Northern Ireland and its Union with Britain as the Free State refused to participate. Northern Ireland expressly used exhibitions to demonstrate its allegiance to the United Kingdom, to further their trade in linen and shipping, and to consolidate their national standing. However, some Irish citizens critiqued this imperial identification as sacrificing and obfuscating the power and autonomy of Northern Ireland. Exhibitions of the 1930s saw a narrative shift as the Free State embraced exhibitions in their nation-building project. Organisers constructed displays of traditional arts and crafts alongside technological advancement and history to bolster their new country. They rejected past depictions of Irishness and espoused the country’s dominion status in the Commonwealth, stressing a separation from the British Empire. The chapter exposes how both the Free State and Northern Ireland used exhibitions as a platform to create new forms of Ireland and Irishness in the interwar period. Different political and ideological positions on empire worked themselves out in the display and its reception.
Exhibitions were a global phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that attracted audiences from the far reaches of the globe. As a source of entertainment and education, they operated under a triptych of commercial motivations and outcomes: to stimulate trade for the displayed countries, to encourage sales of the exhibited goods, and to provide the employment of local labourers. The politics of display influences the production of Irish identity according to a host of contexts. The practices of display were shaped by issues of funding, organisers’ motives, and the larger purpose of the event itself, which in turn fed back into Irish understandings of themselves politically, economically, socially, or culturally as industrialists, capitalists, women, Home Rulers, British imperialists, nationalists, and Republicans. The fluid nature of embodied Irish identity in international contexts as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent state is evoked in the book’s larger analysis. Exhibiting Irishness is transnational in scope, encompassing exhibitions in Ireland, the British Empire, and the United States, and each exhibition is placed in the wider political, economic, and cultural locale of its time. Thus, the lens of exhibitions reveals several unique arguments regarding Irish identities as singular and broader collectives working with and through gender, capitalism, and race in a larger configuration of empire and whiteness from the 1850s to the 1960s.
The introduction sets the scene for the book by looking at the example of one Roman Catholic family in Aden. This family sends its children to school in Agra, north India, using male Roman Catholic connections. The tragic story of one daughter illustrates the racial, religious and geographical complexity of the Roman Catholic overlay in colonial India. The historical and cross-disciplinary methods of research for the book are explained. Who the women religious in India were is then outlined as well as the secular and religious patriarchies who interacted with them. The transactional nature of these women is discussed. The chapter then explains why the author sees these Roman Catholic women as the ‘strange products of empire’ when situating them within the current literature and research about women, empire and religion.
Chapter Five changes direction to look at Gonzaga Joynt’s Loreto House and the elite forms of education it burnished. This was a direct cultural transference from Europe and amplified the class and race distinctions of the raj: here Indians were ‘othered’ by immature European girls, naturally curious about a world they did not occupy. In such institutions, government wished to exclude nearly all Indians, and Rome wished to exclude all Protestants. These constraints created new financial risks for Loreto House, despite teaching support from Loreto in Australia. With the coming of Froebel to India, this chapter then explains why Loreto House was given the support of government to establish college-level education for women in 1912. The First World War saw the expulsion from India of nearly all German Jesuits.
Chapter Six examines new Roman Catholic moves to educate poor Indians in villages around Morapai in the Sunderbunds, and at Entally, Calcutta. The chapter looks at these differently arraigned communities, where orphans and conversion were at the centre of the interaction in the early part of the twentieth century. The agency of the Indian Daughters of St Anne (now transferred from Ranchi) built semiotic and epistemological thresholds from the village to Western learning spaces that would stay with the Loreto order for the rest of the century.
Chapter Three analyses Loreto’s expansion, creating new convents and schools between 1848 and 1881. It examines the beginnings of the three most significant: at Bow Bazaar and Sealdah (both within Calcutta’s city precincts, yet with completely different pre-existing Roman Catholic genealogies and India-specific constraints), and then a new convent and school founded at Darjeeling (644 kilometres away). The chapter then turns to the Entally orphanage in Calcutta and explores Loreto’s stronger forays into the education of poor Eurasians.
Chapter Eight assesses Loreto’s engagement with poorer Indian students in Nehruvian India and in the decades following, up to the twenty-first century. The order, through its different sisters, constructed ‘poverty’ in different ways and with different philanthropic connections. The future Mother Teresa chose that which she found at Entally. A secondary school for Indians was established, and pathways to college education were created for them that did not mandate learning through the medium of English, but in Bengali instead. A convent education meant, for some parents, escape from the strictures of caste and, paradoxically, escape from (Indian) religion as well.
The final chapter of the book settles upon the work of Sister Cyril Mooney and her community at her Loreto school in Sealdah after her appointment in 1979 and until her retirement in 2012. Even in the early 1980s the school contained colonial remnants. Yet Cyril’s work was a microcosm of inclusive education and largely effective outreach that moved well beyond convent walls. It connected with, and became enmeshed within, secular NGOs, where she drove their philanthropy to better target educational programs for poorer Indians. Two decades before India’s Right to Education Act of 2009 (which obliges middle-class private schools to have an enrolment of at least 25 per cent socially disadvantaged Indians), middle-class children and their parents in Cyril’s school were recruited by her to reach poverty on Calcutta’s streets. The chapter details Cyril’s ground-up models of outreach that were later emulated by government, as well as by some of Calcutta’s fifty other significant education NGOs.
Chapter Four sees a changing India and new imperial mentalities reach the door of the convent in India by 1884. Mother Gonzaga Joynt was the new Provincial Superior of Loreto Calcutta. Grim child-rescue mentalities – children forcibly taken from their parents in Calcutta’s slums – were part of an empire-wide strategy for those in chronic poverty. For the government, this was a eugenically inspired project, but for the Roman Catholic church it was an opportunity to create more Roman Catholic converts. With this accidental synergy between government and church in view, the chapter explores Loreto’s complicity with the Jesuits in setting up a new convent at Asansol. The chapter then explores the creation of a second convent at Ranchi (again following the Jesuits) with a completely different micro agenda. At Ranchi, a wedge was driven between tribal Indians and their Hindu exploiters to create a new Christian enclave – one that would then give rise to the Daughters of St Anne, a sub-order of Indian Loreto sisters.