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 explores the general crisis in the production of knowledge about India, which rose about from the forged homologies with London, by British observers during the nineteenth century. Attempts to locate India historically similarly drew upon implicit understandings and served to consolidate Company administration. As the century closed, evangelicalism and a radical utilitarianism increasingly displaced the outlook of India. Sympathetic conservatism of orientalism yielded a more aggressive project intent on dragging India into the civilized and modern world. William Jones sought to codify the Indian legal system, and in so doing ‘discovered’ India's ancient past; Thomas Munro laid the foundations for the administration of land settlements; and James Rennell mapped India. Although each relied on knowledges and methodologies that had been developed in the West, there was no obvious reference to metropolitan concerns. Neither topographical maps of London nor Ordnance surveys contributed to the project of mapping India.
This book addresses the analytical consequences of the encounter between West Indian and Briton. West Indian emigrants came from societies well advanced in the prerequisites of breaking from colonialism. The West Indian presence created new possibilities within the metropolitan culture for the issues to be spoken. West Indian exiles in London played a decisive role. For West Indians to ‘become’ postcolonial they were required to destroy the external authority of the British. The Pleasures of Exile and Beyond a Boundary represent the theorisation of the migrant view of England. Through the 1960s, West Indians in Britain were alive to the cultural developments in the newly independent countries of black Africa, and representatives of a new generation of black African novelists found in the Caribbean Artists Movement a welcoming home.
This chapter places the IODE in a historical context, revealing its substantial contribution to the making of an Anglo-Canadian identity in the image of Britain. This study, which is about a group of women and the collective identity and vision they forged, focuses on the IODE's invention of ‘Britishness’ as a part of its vision for Anglo-Canada. That focus makes necessary the complicating of notions of imperialism as beginning in a European metropole and expanding outwards. Instead, colonialism becomes ‘a moment when new encounters with the world facilitated the formation of categories of metropole and colony in the first place’. In addition, the chapter looks at the imposition of hegemony, not by the direct force of a colonising power, but by the mimicry of descendants from the constructed British imperial center. It also takes up Buckner's challenge, and examines the development of a British Canada through the work of a group of female imperialists.
This chapter provides an introduction to a study that traces the circumstances in which political rights were accorded or denied to Indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa from the 1830s to 1910 by British colonists. It compares the nature of colonization in settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa and colonies of exploitation such as India. In colonies of settlement, economic interests of colonists were vested primarily in securing permanent control of the land, maximizing settler access to land and converting that land to property. The settlers focused on establishing British systems of law and government and launching of the independent states if settler hegemony could be achieved. The chapter furthermore discusses the aspects of property and political rights in the relationships between settlers and Indigenes.
This chapter focuses on the understanding of the late Victorian army that has benefited from a diverse and burgeoning array of scholarship. There are major works on civil–military relations, the army and society, army reform, and imperial defense, buttressed by biographies of senior commanders, studies of war correspondents and the role of the army in imperial propaganda. The late Frank Emery revealed that Victorian soldiers had written numerous letters from earlier campaigns. Letter-writing was not an exclusive preserve of regimental officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and private soldiers wrote many shrewd and observant commentaries. Emery spread his work over much of the Victorian period, including odd letters from the Crimea, India and Afghanistan, and so covered several campaigns in a perfunctory manner. More recent writing indicates that there is an abundance of material to sustain more focused research and writing on particular campaigns. From the Egyptian campaign onwards, the military authorities moved beyond exhortation and censored telegrams from the front.
After the decisive battle of Plassey, various forms of knowledge production grew exponentially. In 1784 the Asiatic Society of Bengal was formed. It was at this moment that equations of state were brought into a unitary epistemological field. This chapter argues that the eighteenth-century European state established its authority by codifying and controlling the representation of the relationship between the past and the present. The accumulation of vast amounts of information on finance, trade, health, crime and industry served this end. In Britain this cultural project was integral to the country's emergence as a colonial power, and since India was potentially the most important colony, the consolidation of the state brought the two countries into a relationship of mutual reciprocity. The projects of state building in both countries—documentation, classification and bounding, and the institutions therewith—often reflected theories, experiences and practices worked out originally in India and then applied to Great Britain as well as vice versa.
This chapter addresses in what sense Jean Rhys could be called a West Indian. Three of her first four novels, and many of her short stories, are placed in Europe, and have heroines with no apparent knowledge of the Caribbean. The fiercest battle over her place in West Indian literature was fought out in the 1970s. Rhys is a diasporic intellectual, with the migrant's consciousness of the shifting complexity of identities and the impossibility of an assured ‘arrival’. Like other West Indians, Rhys met immediate prejudice when she reached England. Her attitudes are never simple, and she says at one point that her hatred of England was really ‘disappointed love’. Rhys' fiction imagines Englishness as the apotheosis of whiteness, in contrast to Caribbean blackness. Wide Sargasso Sea is Rhys' most Caribbean novel, linguistically as well as in subject matter.
The chapter highlights the influence of the USA and looks to the IODE's most recent projects in the Canadian north, covering the demise of the ‘racial hierarchy’ and the IODE's corresponding shift of focus away from immigrants to the canadianising of ‘new’ Canadians. It shows the IODE negotiating a position increasingly away from that of government, moving towards children and individuals as the focus of its ‘charity’. The IODE has shifted focus, a shift that began during the Cold War, to a group of citizens who, although living within Canadian territory, were previously considered ‘foreign’. This shift represented a change in Canada's identity from that of a dominion in the Empire, with an identity centered on Britain, to that of a nation situated in Canadian geographic space. The decreasing confidence in colonial attitudes was reflected in the drifting away of the IODE from involvement with the Canadian government towards the spaces of charity and home. This study draws out the irony manifest in the attempt to assimilate indigenous peoples into the national project, and make them the same as other Canadians, while clinging to the spatial and social difference of the north. As this chapter shows, through the IODE's work in the Canadian north, this colonisation took place within a national boundary.
This is a detailed study of the various ways in which London and India were imaginatively constructed by British observers during the nineteenth century. This process took place within a unified field of knowledge that brought together travel and evangelical accounts to exert a formative influence on the creation of London and India for the domestic reading public. Their distinct narratives, rhetoric and chronologies forged homologies between representations of the metropolitan poor and colonial subjects—those constituencies that were seen as the most threatening to imperial progress. Thus the poor and particular sections of the Indian population were inscribed within discourses of western civilization as regressive and inferior peoples. Over time, these discourses increasingly promoted notions of overt and rigid racial hierarchies, the legacy of which remains to this day. This comparative analysis looks afresh at the writings of observers such as Henry Mayhew, Patrick Colquhoun, Charles Grant, Pierce Egan, James Forbes and Emma Roberts, thereby seeking to rethink the location of the poor and India within the nineteenth-century imagination. Drawing upon cultural and intellectual history, it also attempts to extend our understanding of the relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’.
This chapter examines the innovative work of the IODE in memorialisation and considers war memorials as producers of identity, tracing the shifts from colonial British space to national Canadian space. Through its war memorials, the IODE has used memory to produce identity, instilling a shared sense of the past and defining aspirations for the future. It has also demonstrated its capacity for insight, initiative and innovation, exerting efforts well beyond the erecting of stone memorials, and was involved in memorialising Canada's part in war through gendered feminine activities concerned with the care and nurture of the national family. Memorialisation was also achieved through the process of naming. Many IODE chapters were named after war heroes or military contingents, while others took the names of battalions to which they were attached. The IODE has known how to utilise education and encourage young minds to perpetuate imperial and national ideology based upon memorialisation.