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 One establishes the Roman Catholic religious terrain of Calcutta. It analyses the complex heritage of Roman Catholicism in the city, which was entangled with newly established British colonial categorisations around race and class. These entanglements reconfigured even earlier Euro-Portuguese mentalities as they related particularly to Roman Catholic Eurasians. The chapter then focuses on the Loreto in Calcutta as the first-arriving female Roman Catholic convent in the city.
The commodification of Irishness now articulates itself in a multi-billion-pound industry that capitalises on motifs of the country. For instance, so-called Irish pubs exist in almost every country of Europe, with shamrocks a regular feature of modern life. Stereotypical images of Irishness rooted in the land and its people have a currency and traction that transcends borders, and we can see their origins in international exhibitions. The exhibitions created marketable symbols of Irishness that now have a life of their own, articulated primarily through the tourism industry. In the same way that exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries accommodated for different politics and biases, the mass market of Irishness is deluged with predictable motifs of Irishness, divorced from its political sphere. A saleable Irishness emerged in exhibits of the past and are now the product of a lucrative global phenomena of Irish culture, whether related to the Irish landscape, the Irish people, or Irish products. Overall, the book uncovers that exhibitions are a key conduit for assessing the changing landscape of Irishness over two centuries by focusing on the politics of display.
The conclusion reflects upon the personal standpoint of the author – as a Westerner and as a male researching disempowered Indian females. The metaphors that the modern-day city of Calcutta (Kolkata) presents to any author are used to illustrate the epistemological complexities involved in writing this book, which crosses over many racial, religious, gender, cultural and colonial boundaries. The conclusion then posits the false equivalences made by missionaries (Protestant and Roman Catholic) between the faith-based systems of the West and the East. There is also a discussion of how Roman Catholics were situated in India after independence in 1947. The colonial mentalities that ensnared them are summed up, as well the problematic application of Western feminism to Roman Catholicism in India today.
This chapter interrogates Ireland’s post-colonial moment. In the 1960s Ireland’s display took many forms and was debated extensively. There was an Irish Village on the Pike at the Seattle World Expo 1962 and an Irish Pavilion in the New York World’s Fair 1964–65. After much debate, Ireland finally withdrew from the Montreal World Expo 1967. The chapter demonstrates how the rationale behind exhibitions had significantly shifted by the 1960s, as success was no longer defined by immediate financial profit but within the diplomatic sphere. Importantly, funding of the events moved from private industrialists to public taxes, creating more accountability and greater criticism when financial failings were reported. Irish politicians largely recognised that exhibitions had spurious financial gain and instead their value came from being seen on the world stage in a break from earlier displays that sought trade and profit. Despite the country’s financial troubles, the importance of presence on the world stage gained significance for a struggling Ireland. Ireland’s continued participation in the expensive expositions of the late twentieth century reflected how concerns of international diplomacy eclipsed issues of commercial profit since financial losses were so likely. Overall, exhibitions were no longer needed for mass advertising, which made the ideological motives of exhibits obsolete in the 1960s. Yet the chapter highlights how issues of state propaganda usurped the need for financial gains like earlier centuries given the performative requirements of global capitalism.
This chapter follows the Famine exodus to the United States and considers the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to illustrate how exhibitions of the Irish interacted with transatlantic activism and philanthropy. It focuses on Lady Aberdeen’s and Alice Hart’s Irish villages, designed to help the Irish poor by analysing planning documents, written correspondence, and reports from the fair. Both women’s philanthropy was in keeping with the revival ethos popular in nineteenth-century Ireland and supported the renewal of cottage industries by presenting the country as a tranquil space in the fairground. Elite women used Irish exhibitions to combat poverty by presenting a rural Ireland worthy of revival, targeting Irish migrants in the United States. Significantly, the preservation of Ireland’s rural aesthetics for elite consumption became equal to ‘saving Ireland’ for many female philanthropists involved in a benevolent charitable politics. Their split and the eventual presentation of two Irish villages reveal differences in the Irish Home Rule movement, with Aberdeen adopting a more moderate vision of Irish independence in contrast to Hart’s more radical perspective. The two women’s display of Irishness enabled a language of nation to emerge that reinforced a separation from England and a connectedness with Ireland in the United States. They addressed issues of migration by offering a transnational representation of a rural Ireland enveloped within an Irish American identity. The advertising of Ireland tugged on the heartstrings in a clever, profitable way; visitors could buy a trinket or souvenir and simultaneously feel like they were helping further Irish industry.
This book explores Roman Catholic female missionaries and their placement in colonial and postcolonial India. It offers fascinating insights into their idiomatic activism, juxtaposed with a contrarian Protestant raj and with their own Church patriarchies. During the Great Revolt of 1857, these women religious hid in church steeples. They were forced into the medical care of sexually diseased women in Lock Hospitals. They followed the Jesuits to experimental tribal village domains while also catering for elites in the airy hilltop stations of the raj. Yet, they could not escape the eugenic and child-rescue practices that were the flavour of the imperial day. New geographies of race and gender were also created by their social and educational outreach. This allowed them to remain on the subcontinent after the tide went out on empire in 1947. Their religious bodies remained untouched by India yet their experience in the field built awareness of the complex semiotics and visual traces engaged by the East/West interchange. After 1947, their tropes of social outreach were shaped by direct interaction with Indians. Many new women religious were now of the same race or carried a strongly anti-British Irish ancestry. In the postcolonial world their historicity continues to underpin their negotiable Western-constructed activism – now reaching trafficked girls and those in modern-day slavery. The uncovered and multi-dimensional contours of their work are strong contributors to the current Black Lives Matter debates and how the etymology and constructs of empire find their way into current NGO philanthropy.
Exhibiting Irishness traces multiple constructions of Irish identity in national and international displays between the 1850s and the 1960s as Ireland moved from a colonial to an independent, globally connected state. As a cultural history of Irish identity, the book considers exhibitions as a formative platform for imagining a host of Irish pasts, presents, and futures. Fair organisers responded to the contexts of famine and poverty, migration and diasporic settlement, independence movements and partition, as well as post-colonial nation building. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, exhibitions captured the imagination of organisers and visitors. The global displays were heralded as a unique, profitable, and unsurpassed forum for celebrating a country’s wares, vying for increased trade, and consolidating national mores. Exhibitions were grand spectacles that showcased the manufactures, industries, arts, technologies, histories, and communities of various nations on an international platform for the consumption of millions of visitors over several months. Each chapter demonstrates how Irish businesses and labourers, the elite organisers of the fairs, and successive Irish governments curated Irishness. The central malleability of Irish identity on display emerged in tandem with the unfolding of Ireland’s political transformation from a colony of the British Empire, a migrant community in the United States, to a divided Ireland in the form of the Republic and Northern Ireland, a separation that continues today. In sum, this book tells the story of how an international Irish identity has always been about selling Irishness – an Irish identity always on sale.
The chapter considers Ireland’s post-Famine exhibitions in the 1850s to argue that they became a crucial stage through which to debate post-Famine reconstruction policies. Ideas of Ireland’s recovery after its national tragedy were contested along nationalist and unionist lines to varying effects. This chapter argues that Ireland was theorised as a transitional space in constant need of development after suffering from famine and long-term poverty. A progressive timeline for Irish advancement was visualised in the fairs of the 1850s, which evoked an Irish past as a means for surviving in the present through hope for the future. This relied on laissez-faire politics and the power of the individual (mainly women) to survive hardship based on their individual labour through a competing unionist or nationalist framework. In the 1850s, narratives of Ireland’s future in London, Cork, and Dublin, like its exhibition, reporting, and reception, were contradictory and subject to revision. Through the consistent narration of Ireland as developing, the exhibitions did not demonstrate Ireland’s prowess to the world but instead became an opportunity for Ireland to learn from the industry of others. While the 1851 Exhibition can be read as what the British government allied with Irish industrialists wanted for Ireland, the 1852 and 1853 exhibitions reveal how an Irish nationalism interacted with the period’s broader imperialism for Ireland’s economic expansion. The exhibitions of the 1850s demonstrate that a hybridity of politics on Irish development were held by Irishmen and women within the mixed loyalties of Irish unionism and Irish nationalism.
Chapter Two examines the convent view of the Great Revolt of 1857. Women religious hid in church steeples or were saved by marble church ceilings from angry Indian sepoys below – whose seemingly unprovoked violence served to confirm to these frightened women religious the barbarity of the ‘lessor’ races. The chapter then brings the focus back to an individual woman religious: Mother Delphine Hart, the first Provincial Superior of Loreto. This chapter also examines the galvanised and complex sectarian divide in India, and the failed Protestant attempts in Bengal to educate Indian girls between 1818 and 1840.
This chapter follows the trajectory of a single Irish Village named Ballymaclinton in the early twentieth century and demonstrates how agitation over Home Rule was bodily enacted within the fairground through performing whiteness. In particular, a commercial union with Britain was powerfully evoked by two Irish entrepreneurs, David and Robert Brown, who advertised soap by exploiting popular images of Ireland. The chapter demonstrates that an Irish brand was used to convince international visitors of Irish whiteness, which was deemed to be central for commercial profit. For the first time, exhibits of Ireland were organised exclusively by Irish entrepreneurs. They traded on familiar stereotypes of Ireland to create an accessible and financially lucrative image of the country to further their company’s sales which was tied to the politics of Home Rule considered necessary for the business’s expansion. The Brown brothers combined business and philanthropy to sell soap in their commercial extravaganza. Ballymaclinton petitioned against Home Rule and visualised the benefits of Unionism for the broader Irish and British populace. It cultivated a white Irishness that amalgamated an Irish past – rooted in history and tradition – and an Irish present and future – stemmed in industry and investment. However, the coupling of these two narratives often became unstuck and revealed the internal contradictions of the Village project. The chapter convincingly evokes how a white racialisation politics intersected with Home Rule debates to prove and authenticate Irish acceptance into the white, British respectability structures of early-twentieth-century capitalism.