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- Author: John M. MacKenzie x
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The foundation of the Royal Colonial Institute in 1869 has often been seen as a significant event in the rise of late nineteenth-century imperial sentiment. In 1886 the planners of the Imperial Institute hoped to engross the Royal Colonial Institute, together with other bodies like the Royal Asiatic Society, under its aegis, to create a great central institution for Empire study and propaganda. The activities of all these societies overlapped with official imperial propaganda and with the imperial studies movements. The Primrose League did more perhaps than any other society to generate an emotional and uncritical enthusiasm for Empire. The Imperial Federation League had the most precisely specialised, and the grandest, objective of all the imperial organisations. Just as the Boer War had spawned the Victoria League and the League of Empire, the patriotic fervour of the Great War gave rise to yet another association, the British Empire Union.
The geography taught in late nineteenth-century schools was primarily human and historical. In religious instruction the expansion of Christendom, with stories of missionary heroism, neatly dovetailed with the central themes of history, geography, and English readers. The Education Code of 1892 incorporated suggestions for instruction on British colonies, and school inspectors were urged to develop studies from the fourth to higher standards. The Geographical Association recommended the study of Empire geography in secondary schools in 1896, and the Library Association introduced a section on colonial literature in the library assistants' examination from 1904. The Royal Colonial Institute (R.C.I) was also active in promoting the writing of textbooks. A set of textbooks began to appear from 1889, covering in successive volumes the West Indies, Canada and southern Africa. In Bristol, the Navy League distributed a textbook to schools indicating the importance of the navy in British and implication to Britain's future.
By the 1880s the new morality had come to be wedded to the late nineteenth-century world view and was suffused with the patriotic, racial, and militarist elements which together made up the new popular imperialism. The result was the creation of a well tested mould of popular juvenile literature which continued to form the products of this very considerable market until the 1950s. The 'penny dreadfuls', recounting tales of Gothic horror and criminal 'heroism', enjoyed their boom period between 1830s and 1880s. The influence of the penny dreadful seems to have excited almost as much concern among the middle class as television today, and studies of their effects were instituted which have a familiar ring. Howard Spicer, who published 'Boys of our Empire' between 1900 and 1903, founded the Boys' Empire League. It was designed to be an imperialist boys' movement dedicated to ideals of patriotism and Christian manliness.
Deliberate efforts were made to suck working-class children into a consciousness of imperial and military destiny, both through the curriculum and through drill and exercise. Drill had been introduced to the pauper schools as early as the 1850s. In the Central London school district there was a school with a mast and four six-pounder guns for training in seaman and gunner duties. In 1900 the new Board of Education recognised organised games as a substitute for drill. The sports field constituted for most ex-public school boys the idyllic memory of schooldays at home before imperial service abroad. J. O. Springhall has pointed to the surprising resilience of the Empire Day movement in the post-war period, an era which has so often been depicted as a time of anti-imperialism. The 1929 report appealed for funds for an extensive scheme of propaganda among the working classes.
A whole range of propagandist imperial bodies, conventionally regarded as failures, in fact succeeded in diffusing their patriotic intentions and their world view, if not their specific and sophisticated plans of action, through almost every institution of British life. H. M. Hyndman noted the remarkably patriotic fervour of the poorest of the working-class districts of London during the Boer War. In fact, as Robert Roberts in particular makes clear, the British had created a popular cultural dimension to match their remodelling of the world through economic and political control. The great imperial epics of Alexander Korda and Michael Balcon were among the most popular films of the 1930s, and they were repeatedly reissued during and after the Second World War. The imperial adventure tradition continued to dominate juvenile literature, comics and the annuals which became such a feature of children's publishing.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the pre-First World War period by surveying the influence of imperialism on a variety of media and leisure activities between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War. It offers a bridge between the pre-1914 period and the interwar years and between the public school and state school systems. The public schools had a remarkable influence upon juvenile literature and other aspects of popular culture. The book demonstrates the manner in which the imperial economic vision lay ready to hand for the publicists and public relations men who saw the Empire Marketing Board as the great opportunity in the inter-war years to develop their craft. It argues that the Scout movement was created in the atmosphere of defensive Empire in the Edwardian period.
This chapter proposes to test the BBC's proposition with regard to the British Empire and imperialism. The period selected embraces fifteen years of John Reith's command of the BBC to 1938 and fifteen years after his departure. Early in its history, the BBC developed a tradition of what might be described as flagship programmes. Although there is little audience research until 1936, and it is even then only fragmentary until the fifties, these programmes were often described as being extremely popular, and all attempts by BBC programme planners to kill them off were thwarted. They frequently caused embarrassment within the Corporation, but they seemed to provide it with an admiring national audience, a good press, and social and political respectability. The activities of the BBC cast a very curious light on the notion that popular imperialism was killed by the First World War.
Juvenile literature invariably represents the values, aspirations or fantasy life of a contemporary elite. In the Victorian and Edwardian periods such literature was usually produced by middle-class writers and illustrates their desire to ally themselves with the ideals of the social class above them. The Victorians were enthralled by the natural world. Few writers devote so much attention to hunting: the economic and moral ideas are firmly rooted in the human relationship with nature, and all are suffused with a romantic melancholy. Trapping and hunting lay at the heart of the nineteenth-century image of exploration, pioneering, and adventure. By the early years of the twentieth century large parts of Africa were beginning to be transformed into the hunting playground of a European elite. Mayne Reid set several of his hunting tales in South Africa, The Bush Boys, The Young Yagers, and The Giraffe Hunters.
The study of imperial history has entered a new phase. In the era of decolonisation, the search was on for explanations of imperialism as an aberrant phenomenon, a fever in human affairs with a complex epidemiology requiring close aetiological scrutiny. In Britain, historical studies were dominated by a school of 'Little Englander' historians who believed that imperialism had no significance for domestic history. The history of the natural sciences helps to confirm that the imperial connection was far from being simply a diffusionist process. Imperial explorations served to create the social and political contexts of the development of geological ideas in the nineteenth century. The imperial state called forth new disciplines, developed old ones, and served to institutionalise and professionalise them. But this activity took place within, and was conditioned by, specific cultural configurations. In coping with the natural world, the effectiveness of colonial corporist strategies should never be overestimated.
There is abundant evidence to suggest that the tsetse fly had conditioned the patterns of human settlement and cattle keeping throughout eastern and Central Africa for many centuries. African understanding of the tsetse and its relationship to nagana makes an excellent starting point, for Europeans learned a great deal, more than they sometimes liked to admit, from African knowledge. The British army surgeon, David Bruce, working in Natal in 1894, established that nagana was caused by a trypanosome transmitted to cattle by tsetse. The incidence and distribution of human trypanosomiasis are more obscure. In one well-known medieval reference, Ibn Khaldun seems to describe the symptoms of sleeping sickness in his account of the death of a king of Mali in the fourteenth century. In early 1960s, several other tropical diseases had been mastered much more comprehensively.