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
Starting with an example that shows the surprising loyalty of the revolting slaves on Saint-Domingue, the later nation-state of Haiti, to the French king, the Introduction develops the theme of empire building in the French colonial realm in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First, it underlines the importance of historical actors that play a major role in this book despite its focus on material culture. This is explained by the slight difference to the mainstream in the studies of material cultures that tends to emphasize the consumption of things rather than the conditions under which these were produced. In this revived concept of materialism the study of colonial building projects fits perfectly, since the sources available for the process of construction reveal precisely the people, material, and aesthetic concepts involved. Overviewing previous literature on colonial building projects in other empires in general and on the French empire in particular, it becomes apparent that only few newer publications have discovered the importance such undertakings had for implementing cultural, political, and social identities within a largely fragmented and culturally diverse society. The Introduction concludes with an analysis of the book’s structure, a reflection on used written and material sources, as well as a note on currencies and measures.
The constellation the French encountered at the coast of Senegambia was already one of a mixed society formed over centuries after the arrival of Portuguese traders in the region. But following the founding of the Senegal Company, French directors and the Company’s agents pursued a more ambitious building programme that included larger fortresses on Gorée Island and on Saint-Louis Island in the estuaries of the Senegal River. The style of colonial buildings in Saint Louis and on Gorée Island did not develop in the same manner as it did in the Antilles, Pondichéry or, for that matter, in Canada. Government buildings, trade houses, and residences were, for example, largely influenced by the ornamental style of the Toucouleur, an ethnic group of Muslim faith that settled in the area of today’s Mali. It was only in the later period of territorial colonization of West Africa that the colonial style superseded the local Creole style.
This chapter examines the effects large buildings had on people building and living with them. In describing the formation of such a landscape of affective buildings the material evidence is to speak for itself, that is, written accounts of impressions these buildings may have had on an observer are only briefly mentioned. By doing this, the material approach to history is taken to its necessary end to sometimes let things speak only through themselves and not by their representation. Showing the success and the limits of this active production of spaces for an emotional community of settlers and slaves on the island, I conclude with an outlook on the Haitian Revolution that did not destroy the landmarks created under colonial rule, but appropriated buildings, monuments, and also, perhaps most importantly, the ambition from the French to create a coherent national identity by continuing the effort to pursue large building projects. Thus the early modern practice of empire building continued in the form of nation building in this first republic of freed slaves in the nineteenth century.
Africans and Europeans were not the only ones involved in the construction of the large buildings on the islands. The indigenous populations, the Caribs, whom the Europeans encountered when they landed on these islands, mastered several building techniques, disposed over knowledge about the local materials, different sorts of woods, stones, corals, and how to handle, use, and apply them for construction works. This chapter describes the multicultural constellation of the population in the Antilles at the beginning of European colonization efforts. A close look on materials used in the large buildings reveals the sort of assemblage that the actor–network theory proposes to be an essential image of the interconnection between things and people. In the Antilles bricks, stones, and lime, including sea corals and shells, were used in many buildings; sometimes French engineers imported bricks, tiles, steel, and even stones from Europe making the walls of the large buildings thus perfect examples of assemblages of Atlantic materials.
This chapter explores the issue of the relation between metropole and colony, as well as of the loyalty of imperial subjects, by exploring the phenomenon of compensation, paid by the government in London to those who had incurred losses in relation to the empire. It is, therefore, a study of imperialism in practice, and of the risks associated with imperial expansion, in terms of the response from the centre to failure at the periphery. This is undertaken in order to analyse the assumptions and principles that structured the making, maintenance and loss of empire, themes that require much greater attention than they have received hitherto.
This chapter demonstrates the importance of recognising the connection between two well known issues – anti-popery/anti-puritanism and orientalism – both of which are understood as tools of ‘othering’ that helped to shape national identity. It demonstrates how responses to the religions of Islamic empires involved claims about popery and puritanism, and how this led to the construction of a discourse of oriental priestcraft and tyranny. It thus argues that later orientalism originated not in Enlightenment philosophy but in late Renaissance and post-Reformation historical culture. As such, it informs our understanding of the relationship between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, as well as between domestic and imperial history.
This chapter sets up the volume by introducing the current state of the historiography on the first British empire, in terms of the sometimes divisive debates about the ‘cultural turn’ and ‘new imperial history’. It highlights the ways in which scholars now seek to build upon such developments while also re-integrating different perspectives and themes, from political economy to religion, law and geography, as well as the interrelationship between policy making in the metropole and policy formation and implementation across the empire. It then demonstrates how the various chapters fit within, but also move beyond, recent scholarship, in order to highlight the wider contribution that the volume makes.
This chapter explores the issues that arose from the ‘transfer’ of Bombay from Portuguese to English control in 1661. It argues that this was a more complex issue than historians have recognised, and that the nature and extent of English sovereignty remained a matter of dispute and a work in progress. Ongoing struggles hinged not only on officials in London and India but also on the regional and geopolitics of imperial expansion, as well as on the critical intersection between maritime and territorial sovereignty. As such, the story offers lessons about the complications at the heart of European claims to colonial sovereignty. Sovereignty, in that sense, was a process rather than a product.
This chapter revisits the famous trial of Warren Hastings, and the prosecution led by Edmund Burke. It does so because this was a fertile moment of what might be called the politics of legal pluralism. Burke understood the impeachment of Hastings as a peculiar and potent form of global legal encounter and came to characterise his dispute with Hastings as a controversy about law, and the trial as a mobilisation of British law to rein in and check the abuse of British power abroad. The trial can be used, in other words, to understand the nature and possibilities of law-governed interactions between Indians and the British, and to explore Burke’s legal pluralism, an increasingly important theme within political-science scholarship, and one with important but hitherto under-developed historical significance.
This collection of essays reappraises the origins and nature of the first British empire. Produced in the wake of protracted and sometimes divisive debates about how best to approach this topic, methodologically and thematically, and in the wake of the so-called ‘cultural turn’, it offers new perspectives and approaches, from some of the most important scholars working in the field, both senior and junior. This is not a matter of returning to older modes of scholarship but rather of learning from the ‘new imperial history’ while also re-integrating political and institutional perspectives. It is not a matter of turning from the experience of empire on the periphery to the study of the ‘official’ mind of empire, but rather of exploring contemporary debates, both within the metropole and across the empire, and how these impacted upon imperial ‘policy’ and its implementation, not least in the face of fairly profound challenges on the ground. These debates ranged widely, and were political and intellectual as well as religious and administrative, and they related to ideas about political economy, about legal geography and about sovereignty, as well as about the messy realities of the imperial project, including the costs and losses of empire, collectively and individually. This book will be of interest to historians and political scientists working in a range of different areas, far beyond merely scholars of empire, and its novel approaches and provocative arguments will help to shape the field on this most important of topics.