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
This chapter represents a response to the argument about the role of party politics in debates about the British empire, and identifies areas of disagreement relating to the political, economic and intellectual culture that went into shaping imperial expansion. This involves recognising that disagreements existed, while challenging the significance of party alignments, reflecting on the wider historiography and introducing comparisons with the Spanish empire; it also involves expressing some degree of sympathy on wider issues of how to approach the study of empire.
This chapter revisits the famous Treaty of Utrecht, and does so in order to challenge the existing historiography on contemporary political debates about empire. It emphasises the importance of reintroducing political discussions into the history of the British empire, not in the sense of returning to older ideas about an ‘official mind’ but rather in the sense of recognising the existence of real debate about the nature and merits of empire. The chapter argues that debates about the treaty reflected party divisions and contrasting political economies, and a struggle over the future of the empire. Setting out these rival versions provides an opportunity to reflect more broadly on recent trends within scholarship on empire, in the wake of the ‘cultural turn’.
This chapter re-examines the relationship between the Protestant religion and the politics of English overseas expansion, and looks at how confessional concerns entered into debates over colonisation. It argues that although English plantation may not have followed the coherent Protestant strategy mapped in early scholarship, the debate over the dominions was nevertheless inflected with spiritual, theological and ecclesiastical concerns. Debates occurred over whether to Christianise indigenous populations or reconstruct the ecclesiastical order of the domestic realm. It also argues that the relationship between overseas expansion and the reformed religion became problematic not because colonial policy was secularised, but because Protestants found no consensus over the sweeping moral, pastoral and political questions provoked by ventures outside Europe.
This chapter tackles a key theme within recent historiography on the first British empire: political economy. It engages with scholarship on the different ideas that existed about land and labour, not least involving Whigs and Tories. It argues that it is vital to explore how these ideological perspectives played out in colonial settings, and at the ‘periphery’. The aim is to suggest that Whig and Tory views within the colonies did not necessarily map precisely onto English party divisions, and that the views of the latter, on issues like slavery, monopolies, labour and prerogative power, were adapted on the ground and in relation to experiences and local circumstances.
This chapter considers the American Revolution as a moment of imperial partition. It explores how, in the wake of the Revolution, Britons and Americans remained entangled with each other in the hemispheric neighbourhood that they still shared. It also explores how, in a situation where governments were weak, where borders were shifting and ambiguous and where the forces that once bound territories and inhabitants together were often as powerful as the ones that drove them apart, making peace proved to be no simple matter, not least in terms of whose interests it served. The consequences of partition involved Britain remaining as a metropole in new ways, and Britain’s former subjects being condemned to a longer cycle of war and conflict.
The afterword takes the British Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century as the launching-off point for considering the mobility practices, forces and relations that underpinned the territorialisation of what is arguably the most powerful ‘imperial’ state in the world today, the United States of America. It discusses the importance of western movements to visions of a new American empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examining a range of representations from political essays to painterly representations of the westward course of empire by horse, wagon and railroad. The focus is on the years surrounding the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 – one of the key infrastructural developments at the centre of the book’s chronological focus on the ‘long’ nineteenth century.
This chapter explores the salience of mobility to an understanding of visual culture in the colonial period, focusing in particular on the works of art produced on board Matthew Flinders's inaugural circumnavigation of Australia between 1801 and 1803: by British landscape painter William Westall (1781–1850) and Austrian botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826). Mobility was a strategic advantage for such artists in providing new material to record both for Enlightenment science and a broader European public; yet it also presented an array of logistical, aesthetic and philosophical challenges. During and following the voyage an enormous number of pencil sketches, and subsequent watercolours, prints and oil paintings were produced to assist with the mapping and classifying missions of the voyage. Mobility, of course, was at the heart of this endeavour, and had at least since the Renaissance been equated with the pursuit of knowledge. Yet what I argue here is that in many senses mobility was utterly at odds not only with the practicalities of producing works of art under such trying circumstances, but more significantly, with the scientific demands made of the voyager artist; namely, precision and immutability.
Historically, vagrancy is defined by the problem of those unwelcome transients who ‘stopped’ in places. Coerced to ‘move on’, these mobile people were among those whose mobility was not celebrated. The central objective of this chapter is to examine the regulation of mobility through its different registers in the legal records of nineteenth-century New Zealand vagrants. Specifically, the chapter provides an account of mobility witnessed through prosecutions for vagrancy. It argues that the ‘politics of mobility’ was produced through power relations: in this case, those relations of power inherent to the laws of a settler colonial mobility within a wider framework of Britain’s Pacific empire. There was one very specific difference which set the colonial legislation apart from its imperial model from the 1830s: the Vagrant Act contained a provision to prosecute vagrant Pakeha/Europeans who were viewed to be consorting with Māori or ‘aboriginal natives’. This chapter proposes that the vagrancy law was a ‘central mechanism’ of the colonial project, and integral to the creation of knowledge about people and populations, allocating control and constructing social difference.
Through an attention to the life and work of William Macintosh – a Scots Caribbean plantation owner, travel writer and political commentator – this chapter considers the significance of individual mobility and the circulation of ideas to Britain’s imperial project in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. It begins with the emergence of Macintosh as a political actor and pamphleteer and his efforts to shape imperial policy from the Caribbean. It then examines the significance of his personal mobility between the West Indies and the East Indies as he completed a journey narrated in his 1782 book Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The circulation of the ideas contained in Travels will be examined for what it reveals about the uneven mobility of knowledge in print. Macintosh’s status as an authoritative commentator on the empire will, moreover, be shown to depend in important ways upon his individual mobility. Overall, the chapter will offer a new perspective on the circulation of seditious print in the Age of Revolution and demonstrate the crucial role Travels played in the trial of Warren Hastings and British governmental efforts to restrict the authority of the East India Company.
Nineteenth-century projects of exploration came to be defined by the practical experience of moving across unknown spaces. However, the place of exploratory travel within the newly emerging science of geography was the focus of heated debates throughout the nineteenth century. The purpose of this chapter is to engage with these discussions and examine the different practices of mobility apparent in making geographical knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century. It introduces the ‘easychair geographer’ as an overlooked, yet important, aspect of the Victorian culture of exploration. Despite not physically going to the places they wrote about, these sedentary practitioners explored by reading, collating and synthesising texts. The chapter addresses the experiences of imperial mobility through a critical study of two seemingly contrasting figures: the sedentary geographer William Desborough Cooley, who compiled a map of Eastern Central Africa while remaining in London, and the missionary-explorer David Livingstone. In reconstructing these experiences, it is shown how their bodies became bound up with meanings of action and stasis. These discussions are further animated by a personal dispute between Cooley and Livingstone, expressed in Livingstone’s 1856 letter, titled ‘Easychair geography versus Field geography’.