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 focuses on the rise of European trade unions in the wake of the First World War. The chapter outlines the major tenets of white worker identity, considers how white workers were internally fractured according to ethnicity, nationality, gender, skill and occupation and demonstrates how trade unions used notions of respectability and pride in whiteness to temper these divisions. Drawing on Barbara Rosenwein, it considers the gendered emotional communities on Rhodesia Railways, with particular emphasis on the disciplining effects of pride, shame and anger. It argues that expressed emotions were structured by race, class and gender and continued to be important markers of white worker identity throughout the period under study. This chapter also interrogates Jonathan Hyslop’s notion of 'white labourism' among European workers in Rhodesia and ends by exploring the role of othering of Africans and Coloureds in the construction of white class identities in the settler colony.
Chapter 4 covers the period in which Southern and Northern Rhodesia joined with Nyasaland in the Central African Federation from 1953 to 1963. This chapter begins with an assessment of white labour strength in the post-war years, with particular emphasis on the position of white women and non-British whites. It also considers the growing numbers of Africans in semi-skilled and skilled work. In response to the increasing encroachment on white male jobs, white workers agitated for a 'white labour policy' in which every job in the colony would be performed by whites despite the centrality of African labour to the economy. This proposed policy is examined as an example of mass cognitive dissonance and a collective fantasy of African elimination. The chapter then turns to a strike of European firemen in 1954 to consider the ways in which the mobility of white settlers disrupted existing trade union structures and racialised practices and argues the strike points to a broader failure of settler socialisation. The chapter ends with a consideration of the role of white workers in the turn to more segregationist and racist practice and election of the Rhodesian Front.
Chapter 3 explores the struggles of men and women to variously challenge or uphold racialised and gendered patterns of recruitment, wages and working and living conditions in the context of the Second World War. Part 1 explores the limitations of white workers’ wartime nationalism and shows that the presence of white working-class RAF recruits, Polish refugees, Italian internees and a growing number of Coloured wage labourers provoked contestation both over what it meant to be British as well as what it meant to be white. Part 1 also explores the increasing numbers of white women in wage labour. It demonstrates that anxieties over white women exploited by employers were aggravated by the relative absence of white men. Black Peril and illusions to African violence became increasingly prominent in trade union journals. African urbanisation, the rise of an African middle class and increasing African militancy and organisation form the context for Part 2. These phenomena are analysed through a theoretical lens that draws upon the production of settler colonial space and the insights of W. E. B. DuBois. The chapter ends with an analysis of the decline of Rhodesia's Labour parties.
Chapter 5 looks at the struggles of white workers as they attempted to protect their racial privileges in the context of Rhodesian Front rule and a brutal war. This chapter challenges the idea that white workers had a harmonious relationship with the Rhodesian Front and looks at the ways white trade unionists struggled against African workers, European employers as well as the Rhodesian state to retain their privileges. White men were increasingly conscripted into counterinsurgency forces; lower-class whites were the least able to evade conscription and the most likely to take on undesirable roles in the war. Conscription also intensified labour shortages, eroded the white male monopoly of skilled trades and put serious strains on family and work life. The numbers of white women in work and the types of work that white women performed significantly broadened. For white men, anxieties over their racial and gendered power that had previously been expressed through Black Peril were increasingly experienced and articulated through fears of castration.
This chapter examines the French station and later colonial centre in the Indian Ocean trade region of Pondichéry. It gives an account of the city’s building history since its founding by a director of the East India Company, a short interludium of Dutch occupation, and the city’s flourishing under the governor-general Dupleix. Compared to the Antilles, the colonial architecture in Pondichéry was much more impressive and lavishly styled. The main structure in the city, Fort Louis, was, however, a construction site over many years until it achieved its intended ideal form in the Vauban fashion. The chief engineers had a large Indian workforce at their disposal that had to be paid to the customs of the land. Therefore expertise for masonry, brickworks, carpentry, etc. was available through the mediation of local contractors who organized the logistics, supply for materials, and most of the work at the construction site. Under Dupleix the most elaborate French architectures emerged, like the government palace, that were supposed to awe the Indian princes of the neighbouring kingdoms. The intention for forming an imperial standing by visual and material means was directed not to Europe, but to the subcontinent itself with its complicated system of states that was loosely bound together by the rule of the Mughal. Thus Dupleix’s ambition to empire was to be recognized by the Indian emperor and not by another European power.
This study explores the shared history of the French empire from a perspective of material culture in order to re-evaluate the participation of colonial, Creole, and indigenous agency in the construction of imperial spaces. The decentred approach to a global history of the French colonial realm allows a new understanding of power relations in different locales. Traditional binary models that assume the centralization of imperial power and control in an imperial centre often overlook the variegated nature of agency in the empire. In a selection of case studies in the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, and India, several building projects show the mixed group of planners, experts, and workers, the composite nature of building materials, and elements of different ‘glocal’ styles that give the empire its concrete manifestation. Thus the study proposes to view the French overseas empire in the early modern period not as a consequence or an outgrowth of Eurocentric state building, but rather as the result of a globally interconnected process of empire building.
This chapter focuses on the French military engineer and architect François Blondel, known for the construction of several monumental structures in metropolitan France. Blondel devised several plans and accounts on the feasibility of developing existing strongholds in modern fortresses or choosing completely new sites for a rayon of fortified towns, forts, and batteries. Blondel’s maps represented the islands as seemingly homogenous entities, where local differences between French and Carib settlements were blurred. This spatial construction of the islands of French territory on representations such as maps or plans was preceded by the so-called seigneurial period on the islands, including next to Guadeloupe and Martinique also Saint-Christophe (Saint-Kitts and Nevis) and Tortuga Island. It was then that French feudal proprietors tried to enclose land with a combination of manorial economy with a kind of baroque representation practice resulting in the creation of several more or less magnificent ‘castles’ on the islands. It is important to consider this ‘feudal’ period in order to understand how it prefigured the effort in the later seventeenth and in the eighteenth century to form a territory from only a few individual and scattered settlements and strongholds that could be regarded as a coherent empire.
The example of the fortified port city of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island (formerly Île Royale) gives a different outlook on large building practices and the community it fostered. Thanks to more available resources in Canada large structures of the city that were destroyed in the Seven Years’ War are not only being reconstructed as a national lieu de mémoire, but also much more thoroughly researched. The towers of this Atlantic coastal town were a landmark that were reputed for not only representing French power in the region against other nations, but also representing the enormous costs figuring in the budgets of the Versailles government. Louisbourg was indeed exceptional to the other colonies in the sense that workers employed at the construction site were predominantly of European origin. The Mi’kmaq, the indigenous nation of the Île Royale, were neither included in the construction of the town nor were they part of its community. The exclusive confinement of Louisbourg, however, can be seen as a spatial practice typical for French expansion in the Canadian Upper Country, where they pursued the establishment of a series of fortresses as a claim to empire in North America. Thus the building practice in Louisbourg was segregationist in nature and did only produce a space that served few French settlers as the condition for forming their French identity.
Departing from an intervention by a colonial official from Martinique at the end of the eighteenth century on the issue of the Exclusif, the French protective trade restrictions in the colonies, emphasis is laid on the ‘right’ earned by individuals and groups in participating in the material construction of empire. As the argument continues the claim is brought forward that those who have built the empire earn a right of its possession, not only morally, but also materially and existentially. The emotional binding of individual, groups, and whole societies to their built environment gives an important insight into how empires become actually stable without having a strong dependence to the centre. The French empire, therefore, is a global construct that is connected by certain similar practices, emotional ties that stretch over the distance of oceans, and finds its best expression in the large buildings and complexes that not only the French had built, but many other people that earned a right of the possession of ‘their’ empire. But the only revolutionary outcome this earned right provoked was on Saint-Domingue, when the newly formed republic appropriated the material culture of the former colony in order to stabilize the new nation of Haiti.
The chapter illustrates that building a fortress (in this case Fort Royal on Martinique) took a considerable amount of time; engineers had to fight the constant lack of sufficient resources, workforce, and the financial funds to keep the construction site running. In detail, the chapter lays out the difficulty the responsible engineers had in receiving funds from the central administration, which most of the time relegated that problem to the local administration. The chapter examines how much materials and workers cost, differentiating between European free and indentured skilled and unskilled workers as well as free and enslaved African skilled and unskilled workers. Also, the body of engineers sent from France to the colonies is addressed here. They performed not only the task of their metier, sketching plans, maps, and drawings for the building projects, but also the more profane duties as managers of the construction site, budget oversight, as well as negotiation with superiors, other officials, and contractors. Concerning the individual careers of these engineers, who were also officers of the French navy, a sojourn in the colonies was considered by most of them more a duty than a privilege.