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 introduction outlines how the foregrounding of a critical perspective on mobility and movement can reinvigorate histories of imperialism, outlining the different practices, subjects and things which have moved or have enabled or constrained imperial mobilities. It sets out the interdisciplinary, conceptual and historical context for the volume, providing an overview of imperial histories which have focused on movement, migration, travel and trade, before outlining how a new and emerging field of mobility studies has focused attention on the distinctive qualities of movement, past and present. The chapter argues that the fields of imperial history and mobility studies can usefully learn from one another, before providing an overview of the chapters comprising the book.
Mobility was central to imperialism, from the human movements entailed in exploration, travel, and migration, to the information, communications and commodity flows vital to trade, science, governance and military power. While historians have written on exploration, commerce, imperial transport and communications networks, and the movements of slaves, soldiers, and scientists, few have reflected upon the social, cultural, economic and political significance of mobile practices, subjects, and infrastructures that underpin imperial networks, or examined the qualities of movement valued by imperial powers and agents at different times. This collection explores the intersection of debates on imperial relations, colonialism and empire with emerging work on mobility. In doing this, it traces how the movements of people, representations, and commodities helped to constitute empires.
The collection examines things that moved across the British Empire, including, objects and ideas, as well as the efforts made to prevent and govern these movements. It also considers the systems, networks and infrastructures that enabled imperial mobilities to happen, and things that went wrong. The collection ranges from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, a period that witnessed the eclipse of the ‘first’ British Empire in North America and the Caribbean, and the expansion of an imperial presence in Asia and Africa, and ends with the empire at its greatest extent in the interwar period. Geographically, it encompasses much of the territorial breadth of the British Empire in Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Caribbean. It also ranges off-shore and into the air.
This chapter covers the interwar period and argues that various promoters of British imperial aviation tried to turn national airmindedness into a notion of imperial aeromobility. In 1927 the Air League of the British Empire was restructured in order to work towards a strong air force, the full development of British civil and commercial aviation, and to promote research into aeronautics, that together would provide security and prosperity within the British Empire. The Women’s Engineering Society held speakers’ series on the idea of a new, mobile, airborne empire that provided opportunities for particular women. Imperial aeromobility promised to reorient relations of time and space as well as deliver air control, new forms of tourism, international harmony and even white women’s independence. However, these dreams were undercut by the messy materiality of flights, pilots and passengers being ‘grounded’ in two senses: they could be prevented from flying and they were embedded in ground-based networks. These ‘groundings’ illustrate Saulo Cwerner’s (2009) point that aeromobilities are interdependent with other networks and complicate the illusion of freedom through flight.
Military officers were an integral part of Britain’s imperial expansion in the eighteenth century. Colonial knowledge was one aspect of a knowledge network that helped drive military innovation and adaptation. In the place of formal education, British military personnel read books broadly related to their profession. Military history was popular in the first half of the century, as officers basked in the reflected glory of Marlborough. Mid-century military defeat, however, brought a new focus on continental military theories and treatises. At the same time, military personnel frequently visited the sites of past military campaigns. In this sense, officers learnt quite literally from the terrain on which battles, campaigns and wars had been fought. In combination, military print culture, colonial knowledge and terrain were the components of a military web, a collection of knowledge networks which catalysed the transmission and exchange of military knowledge throughout the empire. These were the means by which knowledge about war was generated and transmitted, and it is to these that we must look in order to understand British military success and failure in the eighteenth-century empire.
In the early nineteenth century, evangelical seamen’s missions began to appear in Britain, tending to the spiritual and material needs of the sailor class. Fundamental to the movement’s belief in the seaman’s potential to demonstrate British and Christian values to non-Christian exotic communities was the assumption that sailors were a transient people, considered most useful to the empire when travelling ‘on their element’, the sea. Sailors’ behaviour on shore, however, could be detrimental to the empire’s image, often impacting on both settled and indigenous communities. Attempts by colonial missionaries and merchants to direct the sailor’s movements while in port sought to allay local anxieties by reaffirming his place on the sea. The mobility of seamen in China’s Guangdong Province and efforts to provide them with spiritual welfare reveal the anxieties of colonists where the British Empire was yet to have a firm foothold. Over the course of the nineteenth century, attitudes towards the permanence of sailors changed as the relationships between British traders and Chinese authorities shifted, demonstrating conditional acceptance as colonies became more self-assured of their place within empire, or came to regard the presence of seamen as confirmation of their own right to occupy a peripheral space.
Enthusiasm for the connective power of aeroplanes and airships between the two world wars saw aerial mobility rise to prominence as a British imperial project, yet little attention has been paid to the practices, technologies and ‘moorings’ by which the atmosphere was rendered a medium of imperial mobility. One of the most significant parts of this infrastructure was the knowledge and predictive potential provided by meteorology. In order to make sense of how emerging practices of colonial meteorology and imperial aviation were changing conceptions of colonial space, this chapter explores one meteorologist’s own forms of mobility as journeys by car and aeroplane were undertaken to develop and inspect the infrastructural moorings of emergent imperial mobilities. Making use of the memoirs of Albert Walter, government statistician and meteorologist in British East Africa, along with colonial and metropolitan government archives, the chapter examines how mobilities were recounted through narrative forms which called forth older modes of imperial travel writing which Mary Louise Pratt (1992) has analysed as a window onto the ‘anti-conquest’ of scientific knowledge-making and colonial administration.
Lady Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in April 1922. This honour was in recognition of her contribution to studies in natural history, accumulated during the twenty-five years she spent in Burma with her husband, as part of the colonial service. During those years she travelled extensively around the colony, exploring relatively unknown terrains, and gathering knowledge about the country’s botanical and anthropological make-up. Moreover, she and her husband were variously posted in different locations, from Rangoon in Lower Burma to Mandalay in Upper Burma. In 1903 the Wheeler Cuffes were transferred from Toungoo to Mandalay, giving her new opportunities for plant-hunting and botanical painting. Drawing on her private letters, day diaries and botanical illustrations, this chapter will focus on the practices of journeying during her first year in Mandalay (1903–4). It will consider the zones of contact, routes of mobility and mechanisms of inclusion or erasure that went into the making of knowledge about the region’s natural history during this period. Thereby this investigation will open up new dimensions to the project of reconstructing the geographies of colonial knowledge, gender and scientific inquiry, and the role of the visual in scientific communication.
This chapter looks at the roles, lives and ambitions of the ministers of the princely states of the South Asian subcontinent. Highly educated, sharp and very well remunerated, the Indian dewans, as these ministers were called, formed a part of the political elite during British colonialism. Many were knighted, and they played a crucial role in governance, negotiating local pressures within the princely states while demonstrating administrative efficiency to the British. By the end of the First World War, with the growing participation of the Indian princes in the British Empire, the ministers’ role and responsibilities expanded to include representing the Indian princes at international forums, such as the League of Nations, the Imperial Conferences and the Round Table Conferences. The chapter looks at the many roles these men played, from representing their people, the princes and finally, the British Empire, as well as the tensions between these demands.
This chapter investigates the representations of Sarawak under its White Rajas as a model of imperial benevolence, and examines how the ideals of the Brooke raj were conveyed through the centenary festivities which were held in September 1941. Following a brief overview of the history of Sarawak, of Brooke rule and the place of rituals in empire, the chapter explores the events of the centenary week, the popular culture expressed at bazaars and competitions, parades, performances and speeches, and analyses how each reveals the crafting of Brooke rule. It also examines the fundamental changes afoot as a new constitution granting greater self-government was introduced during the centenary celebrations. The chapter demonstrates that by studying how the centenary was celebrated, we gain insights into a territory at the edge of Britain’s formal empire as well as the Brooke dynasty’s self-fashioning of rule in Sarawak.
In 1945, when the French scrambled to rebuild their empire shaken by the Second World War, only the Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai appeared to challenge colonial rule in Indochina. Sihanouk and Mohammed V appeared to be the docile ones in Cambodia and Morocco. All of that changed within a decade as Bao Dai threw in his lot with the French, while Sihanouk and Mohammed V led independence crusades against their colonial kingmakers. This chapter uses a comparative framework to explain why two colonially crowned monarchs in the French empire – Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia and Mohammed V in Morocco – survived decolonisation to become the fathers of independent nations while Bao Dai in Vietnam did not. Four main factors help explain these two different outcomes: the nature of French colonial monarchy in each protectorate; the specific local, national and international circumstances; the individual personalities of each sovereign; and the strategies they employed.