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
Making use of official, international, and imperial archives alongside published sources, this chapter is a new international history of the late nineteenth-century expansion of Australian settler colonial jurisdiction, protection, and annexation of Pacific islands, focusing on Fiji and New Guinea – both of which were, at different times, integral to Australia’s federation project and certainly at the heart of Australian settlers’ cohering visions of empire. This chapter also shows how Australia’s expansion into the Pacific had major unrealized consequences for the legal bases of Britain’s international claims to colonial territories. It likewise demonstrates how Australian expansionists and their supportive publics, in participating in successful annexation schemes, created not only new colonial and imperial obligations for themselves, such as paying for colonial administration, but also international ones, such as protecting Indigenous populations in their territories – doctrines that required important revisions to their ideals of empire.
This chapter takes up the question of how Australian settler colonists governed their own colonial empire in the Pacific and Australia’s Northern Territory. Australia’s vision of empire was to transform from ideal to practice, from the point of view not only of Melbourne bureaucrats who oversaw the colonial governments of each territory, but also if the ‘experts’ tasked with carrying out ‘Australian ideas’ of colonial governance themselves. Using the records of Australian Papua and the Northern Territory along with the private papers of some notable officials, the discussion contextualizes them with records from both public discourses of imperial governance in Australia (taken from newspapers, periodicals, journals, and books) and the growing literature about the ‘science’ of colonial administration emerging to support the training of an Australian colonial service. It ultimately reveals the inherently transcolonial nature of ‘scientific governance’ as well – a theory of colonial government articulated first by Australian officials in Papua that, later, would find application in the Northern Territory and eventually across other British and broader European colonial worlds.
This chapter is a study of Australian participation in Indian famine relief schemes from 1874 to 1901 and the marked shift in Australians’ perceived obligations to help famine victims in British India. Initially Australians responded by organizing or collaborating with private philanthropic initiatives based on claims to individual moral responsibility. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, Australian responses had changed: imperial famine relief was seen more as a public duty to the imperial system in general and to Australians’ fellow imperial subjects in India in particular. Some middle-class Australians had even come to view Indian famines as the product of India’s backward colonial governance and took action to remedy what they increasingly saw as the Raj’s failings or inability to protect their fellow citizens of empire from ruin. In changing their rationale and methods of participating in Indian famine relief, Australian men, women, and children placed new collective responsibilities on themselves to help less capable colonial governments achieve their common imperial mission. They did so not only because of still-felt individual moral duties, but also because of a growing sense of imperial citizenship, in which they had a peculiar role to play as ‘experts’ in mitigating famine and providing social amenity. The chapter reveals how, through these efforts, Australians asserted a position of moral leadership that they felt their vision of empire required.
In revisiting each of the key arguments of the above chapters, this brief conclusion restates the case that Australians, in coming to believe that they were equals in empire, increasingly brought themselves into empire’s discourses, communities, and projects. It restates the case for broadening Australian historiography’s horizons to consider more than just the Anglo-Australian connection when accounting for Australia’s imperial history. The metaphorical meaning of imperial public pageantry at the festival of empire in 1911 is examined; this demonstrates well the public and the private reifications of Australia’s imperial political cosmology. Final remarks are reserved for suggesting where subsequent histories of Australia and empire might go from this foundation.
This chapter illustrates how Australian settlers and their leaders cooperated to create a new, morally legitimate category of martial experience – imperial military service – in contradistinction to the decades of frontier violence that continued to rage as a result of settler expansion. Australian officials, initially convinced of the viability of neutrality, reconfigured their military legislation and prepared their publics for service as the empire’s ‘police force’ throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. In sum, the chapter charts a fuller history of Australia’s participation in armed violence ‘before the ANZAC dawn’, arguing that the many substantial connections that Australia’s colonial militaries maintained with the wider Indian empire – Sudan, but also the North-West Frontier and Burma – and thrice in Southern Africa served to separate ‘military service’ from ‘frontier violence’, creating conditions for Australian participation in ‘imperial’ wars alongside other colonies or Britain itself. Australians thus brought themselves into the military apparatus of empire. They did so first by transforming their militias into modern fighting forces that could cooperate with imperial forces, and then by seeking out opportunities to gain experience, usually on colonial battlefields in South Asia and Africa. Ultimately, the chapter shows that by the early twentieth century, many Australians joined the imperial martial effort because of a perceived sense that their rights to imperial equality also came with real obligations to ‘defend’ their empire in South Africa, the North-West Frontier, or the Pacific.
Challenging conventional historiographies which claim that empire served only to hamper Australia’s national development and which examine only the Anglo-Australian connection, this book draws together for the first time several underutilized archives and emerging literatures to produce a new imperial history of Australia. It is one that places Australian settler colonialism in a broader imperial context while differentiating Australia’s categories for understanding the imperial world from those of London. This book demonstrates that many Australians came to view Britain’s empire not simply as a Greater British world state presided over by London, but as a global, ultramarine republic in which Australian settlers were co-equals. With this vision in mind, Australian settlers developed their own distinct categories for evaluating, criticizing, and claiming empire, ones based on settler logics that often placed race above gender, class, or nationality. Drawing on Australia’s many settler periodicals and official records, The imperial Commonwealth argues that this vision shaped colonial Australians’ understandings of the means and ends of their own settler colonialism came to define their relationship to Britain and motivated them to forge new transimperial connections with other settler and subject colonies in the Pacific, Africa, and South Asia through technology, humanitarianism, and military endeavour. By formulating, challenging, refining, and ultimately translating their own ideal of empire into colonial culture, politics, and law, Australian settler colonists transformed the Commonwealth into an empire in its own right.
Only in the last few years has the idea that Australia might well be thought of as an empire in its own right been floated. Previously, scholars tended to hedge their bets, using such terms as ‘proxy imperialism’ or ‘sub imperialism’, or perhaps simply ‘expansion’. In part, this tenuous approach derived from a previous generation’s scholarly focus on the historical problem of Australian national identity, which was then understood to be antithetical to empire. Yet, as new imperial histories and growing transnational and transcolonial historiographies show clearly, settler polities developed political cultures all their own, and with a variety of ideals animating contentious and unique debates in which ‘nationality’ and ‘empire’ could easily be complementary and even coterminous. Thus Australian settler cultures, ideals, and debates, while often treated as parts of a ‘British world’, deserve to be understood on their own terms. And, in their own words, many Australian settlers and later Commonwealth citizens ordered their political lives and visions of the future according to a unique settler idea of a transcolonial, cooperative project of empire – one that belonged to all white settlers equally, and one that demanded their allegiance as well.
This chapter examines the meaning of empire to late nineteenth-century settlers residing in the various Australian colonies in the decades leading up to the formation of the Australian Commonwealth. It examines Australian settlers’ own attitudes to various London-centred prognostications about the empire’s future, most famous among them Charles Dilke’s idea of a Greater Britain. While it may have earned him praise in the imperial capital, Dilke’s idea drew sustained criticism in Australia. Complementing this discussion, the chapter also examines Australian settlers’ ideas of what their future entailed. This analysis reveals an important reason why Australians’ hope for their political future differed from British ideas: the increasing urgency with which settlers felt that white polities must be defended against a growing coalition of uncivilized and non-white foes. Empire, to these settler minds, was a crucial vehicle for maintaining white hegemony over the world, something upon which the existence of their own settler democracies depended. And to many, Australia’s own federation (while it also served local political ends) seemed a precondition for the longevity of empire and the racialized world order it created.
This chapter explores the relationship between a number of anti-corruption campaigns and the formation of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974, the most important institutional change in British Hong Kong. Corruption had been a serious problem in the colony since the post-war period. The creation of the ICAC, however, was only made possible in 1973, when the press, student organisations and activists exploited the escape of Peter Godber from Hong Kong to Britain and mobilised public opinion. China Mail’s campaign to set up a hotline and conduct a survey successfully drew the attention of the public in Hong Kong and MPs in London, leading to further protest orchestrated by James Johnson and former civil servants. Signature campaigns and demonstrations led by the Hong Kong Federation of Students also received positive responses from the young generation. Campaigners, notably Elsie Elliott, James Johnson and Alan Ellis, worked closely with each other and made good use of their connections with politicians and the mass media to pursue their cause. Archival records suggest that these campaigns created an impetus for the colonial government to renegotiate institutional changes with the British government to eradicate corruption in Hong Kong. Nonetheless, public sentiment did not always influence policymaking. Despite public discontent over the escape of Godber, the Home Office refused to amend the Fugitive Offenders Act to extradite the corrupt police officer. The ICAC was largely successful in restoring public confidence in the colonial government. It played an important role in changing Hong Kong’s political culture.
In 1981, the British Nationality (Hong Kong) Act was passed, stripping the rights of abode in Britain of 2.5 million Hong Kong Chinese. This provoked ‘a sense of betrayal’. This chapter examines how people of different social classes and age groups in Hong Kong responded to the enactment of the British Nationality Act. Despite a strong sentiment of bitterness felt by the Chinese population in Hong Kong towards the British government’s policy, Britain enacted this law to prevent a future influx of immigrants. A new nationality status, British National Overseas (BN(O)), was given to Hong Kong citizens. This legislative change has had a major impact on the late colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong. The Act shaped how residents identified with Britain and Hong Kong. Using both state records and published sources, this chapter analyses the public discourse and investigates how that influenced the policymaking process. In 2020, the imposition of the national security legislation in Hong Kong by China led activists to advocate changes to the Nationality Act. The Foreign Secretary in the United Kingdom recently announced that the country would scrap the six-month stay limit for BN(O) holders, extending it to twelve months, providing a pathway to future citizenship.