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 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.
This chapter examines how special worship was called and for what reasons. It also explains its longevity. Two broad developments are addressed, both of which bear on two of the key concerns of the book: community and church authority. First, after 1850 special worship in the empire became increasingly fragmented and regionalised. Colonial governments commonly appointed special acts of worship for causes that were specific to their particular colonies, such as droughts and frontier wars. Second, the responsibility for organising and ordering special worship gradually passed from civil to ecclesiastical and other non-state authorities. While the first development – the move towards regional occasions – points to the importance of regional and denominational attachments, the second – the growing visibility of church leaders – suggests the confidence of institutional religion. Though the preponderance of acts of worship called for regional causes indicates that identifications below the level of empires, nations and colonies exerted a powerful pull in the late nineteenth-century empire, developments in communication meant that thanksgivings for royal events, notably coronations and jubilees, were now possible, and could be coordinated at the imperial level by the authorities in church and state in metropolitan Britain. Special worship, then, orientated the inhabitants of empire in several directions, both towards an extended imperial nation, and towards more regional attachments.
Special worship demonstrates the confidence and authority of institutional churches in nineteenth-century ‘new world’ societies. To evidence this point, the chapter considers how churches responded to, and increasingly initiated, community-wide special occasions of worship. Non-Anglicans and non-established churches observed state days of worship more frequently and readily in settler colonies than they did in Britain, though how churches responded to orders and invitations from states varied considerably, as styles of worship within denominations differed. Indeed, occasions that had once been monopolised by Anglicans took on an ecumenical and multi-denominational character in the colonial world, though this important development, one that reveals much about relationships between churches, occurred at different speeds in Canada, Australia and South Africa. The chapter asks why non-established and ‘nonconformist’ churches were drawn to state-appointed acts of worship; it also considers the encouragement that special worship gave to those who believed the empire could be united by a common national or imperial church: Anglicans in particular felt their church could be the kind of broad-based institution that represented the diversity of a far-flung imperial spiritual community.
Special worship amplified the communal role of churches and religion: in addition to encouraging and reinforcing denominational identities, fasts, thanksgivings and special prayers could, on occasion, strengthen attachments to alternative ‘we’ and ‘us’ groupings, based on regions and colonies. Special prayers and days nourished a sense of common purpose and shared responsibility among the inhabitants of disparate and diverse colonies and the wider empire. This chapter argues that special worship reflected the complex layers of regional, colonial and imperial denominational identification that developed among the inhabitants of empire. The focus is on how clerical elites articulated these community identifications in their sermons and how understandings of community varied depending on the occasion: though some fasts and thanksgivings orientated colonists towards the mother country and an imperial identity, most occasions were regional events that reminded colonists that their new homes were not Britain and that they, as a community, might be specially favoured and chosen by God. Days of prayer did not make communities; primarily, these occasions reminded individuals that they were social animals, that their lives were bound up with others and that communities shared a past and were recognised by God.
Colonial special worship in the period between the American Revolution and the Great War displayed considerable diversity and complexity. Multiple strands of special worship coexisted in colonial societies and sometimes such traditions were in tension with one another. Furthermore, special worship might expose the difference between regions and people, and it could inflame sectarian tensions While the conclusion notes these points of contest and divergence, it draws out the convergences in special worship and emphasises unifying themes. Colonial governments, as well as a good proportion of the colonial public, continued to acknowledge that God exercised divine superintendence over nations and the natural world. Such evidence challenges the view that colonies with cosmopolitan populations were ideal locations for the development of post-Enlightenment forms of secularised government. Special worship shows that traditional practices, ideas and institutions played vital roles in the journeys that settler dominions made towards modernity. The conclusion also considers what special worship achieved (for instance in bolstering the confidence and national credentials of an imperial Anglicanism), and the extent to which the traditions discussed in the book evolved in the twentieth century and persist to the present day.
The cattle disease of 1865–6 was the last time the civil authorities ordered special prayers in response to a natural calamity. Other colonial states, notably the Canadian and New Zealand colonies, followed Britain and did not mark environmental calamities with special worship after the 1860s.This chapter explains why days of humiliation, appointed in times of drought, proliferated in the unstable ecologies and environments of the Australian colonies after 1860. Drought was considered an appropriate cause, as such ‘slow catastrophes’ were not fully understood, and it was supposed that low rainfall, ruined crops and the mass deaths of livestock affected everyone – urbanites and farmers alike. Repeated days of worship sharpened a providential awareness, reminded colonists of what made their colony or region distinct, and encouraged the kind of provincialism discussed in Chapter 4. The days that churches and states and set aside in times of drought stimulated reflection and debate about the efficacy of prayer, the causes of drought, the relationship between human actions and climate change, and the environmental consequences of colonisation. An archive of ‘environmental sermons’ provides evidence that Christian ministers were conservationists who reconciled a belief in God’s natural laws and processes – His ‘general providence’ – with an interest in technological solutions to environmental degradation.
The introduction defines special worship, explains the chronological and geographical focus, and outlines the book’s key themes. These are brought out through an early examination of the chief similarities and differences between traditions of special worship in the British Isles and the settler colonies. The chief difference, one that provides a key problematic explored in the book, is that while British governments ceased to set aside special days of prayer for all but royal occasions after 1860, colonial states continued to use the royal proclamation to summon their populations to special acts of worship well into the twentieth century. Also, while days of ‘fasting’ and ‘humiliation’, appointed by states, disappeared in the British Isles after 1857, such occasions remained a customary response to crisis in settler societies. All this raises large questions about the nature of authority in colonial societies, the religious basis of community identity and the invention and persistence of tradition in overseas settlements. In addition to exploring these varied histories of special worship, the introduction explains why traditional forms, such as the special day of prayer, require the attention of ‘British world’ scholars. Often the study of colonial society is a search for the new. This book argues that equal attention should be paid to the old and the traditional if the varied character of Britain’s colonial settler societies is to be understood.
Chapter 3 considers the meanings that church leaders, lower clergy, congregations and private individuals attached to special acts of worship. It first considers how governments and churches overcame the ‘tyranny of distance’ and spread the news of forthcoming occasions. Observances, responses and styles of worship varied between churches, but within denominations too. Worship in the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches was structured and centralised, as archbishops and bishops issued forms of prayer and pastoral letters that guided clergy on the causes of worship and the use of prayer books and liturgies. Cultures of prayer and worship in other Protestant denominations had a freer character. Despite these differences, all churches discovered that colonial conditions required them to give much responsibility for organising special worship to lay communities. In many ways, then, it was the laity that made institutional religion work in the colonial world. The chapter also considers the messages, such as collective sin and divine providence, that clergy communicated to congregations (and to indigenous communities on missions) on fasts and thanksgivings. While ministers and congregations shared common providential beliefs, the chapter recognises that special days of worship could be contested occasions: individuals did not always engage in religious events, people disagreed on the meaning of great calamities, and some occasions, such as Canadian thanksgivings, became more about holidaying and feasting.