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This chapter examines the coverage given to the durbar in some Scottish newspapers. It includes The Scotsman, the Edinburgh paper which regarded itself as the Scottish equivalent of The Times, and the Dundee Courier, the Dundee Advertiser and the Dundee Evening Telegraph, together with the coverage in The Times itself. The correspondent of The Times, the distinguished Lovat Fraser who wrote extensively about India, produced At Delhi: An Account of the Delhi Durbar of 1903, which was published in Bombay by The Times of India. The 1911 durbar was targeted much more precisely at the Indian nationalist movement and perhaps also at the public in Britain and the Empire with a possible spin-off into the international arena. It may be argued that the Assemblage and the durbars had a considerable influence on all imperial ceremonials.
The concept of popular imperialism in Britain has stimulated considerable controversy. Kathleen Wilson has charted the significance of aspects of popular imperialism in the eighteenth century and their close relationship with popular politics and the fortunes of administrations and their oppositions during that period. The visibility of empire in other cultural forms can also be presented as having ambiguities which can be stressed by those seeking to deny the existence of a popular imperialism. The whole business of emigration and the information and recruitment mechanisms associated with it have been largely ignored in the discussion of popular imperialism. Emigration statistics are notoriously slippery, but it has been estimated that in the classic age of migration from 1815-1930, the British Isles sent some 18,700,000 people overseas, over one-third of all migrants from Europe.
The significance of hunting in the imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has never been fully recognised. This is curious for the exploitation of animals is everywhere in the imperial record. The economic, sociological and natural historical dimensions of hunting, set within a wider cultural context, have perhaps proved dauntingly complex. Images of the Hunt are everywhere in Eastern and European art. Animals and hunting scenes appear on Egyptian artefacts ranging from ivory wands and combs to stone scarabs, from pottery to slate palettes. The great hunters of the ancient world offered protection to their subjects' life and limb and to their crops by destroying wild predators. The progressive restriction of social access to hunting and the elaboration of its rules and etiquette had a tendency to transform hunting into a predominantly male pursuit.
In Britain the nineteenth-century hunting cult had an extraordinary range of cultural manifestations. As the century progressed the hunting cult was transferred overseas, often searching for a genuine wilderness, and generated an entire ethos which distinguished certain characteristics of the Hunt as markers of civilisation and gentlemanly conduct. The best way for us to approach the hunting cult in the new landscape is perhaps through its architectural expression and the influence of animals on interior decoration. Edwin Landseer epitomised the role of hunting in nineteenth-century culture, transforming the innocence and easy self-confidence of eighteenth-century sporting paintings into a deeply self-conscious and often troubled response to the natural world. Hunters made the connections between empire and natural history even more explicit. In the development of both the study and display areas of the natural history museums the scientists and museum curators were dependent upon imperial hunters.
Hunting was an important part of the pre-colonial economy and diet of many African peoples. Some anthropologists (notably Thayer Scudder and Stuart Marks working in Zambia) have noted the significance of both gathering and hunting among agriculturalists, but historians have generally studied African societies in terms of their principal mode of production. Hunting had a much wider significance than simply the supply of protein or trade goods for export. The social relations and ritualistic powers associated with hunting were complex. Hunting had long been an important activity among the southern Nguni. From the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch settlers had been buying ivory from them, indicating that they were capable of exploiting the elephant resources of the region by that time. The Bemba of north-eastern Zambia provide an example of high commitment to hunting no longer matched by performance.
Until the nineteenth century the fauna of southern Africa was richly diverse, highly prolific, and widely dispersed. Indigenous hunting techniques were varied and effective and game meat constituted a source of protein for almost all the peoples of the sub-continent. Dutch hunting parties were leaving the Colony for hunting grounds in the eastern Cape from the early eighteenth century, and a number of freeburghers made a career as professional hunters. As the animal resources of southern Africa became more important to the international economy in the first decades of the nineteenth century they came to be studied and hunted for science and sport. Cornwallis Harris lamented the decline and disappearance of game in the Cape Colony, and suggested that African hunters, confronted with vast herds in the interior, were bent on extermination.
This chapter examines the primary and secondary periods in Central Africa, and the ways in which they began to give way to the Hunt. White hunters appeared in Central Africa from the 1850s, and by the 1870s and 1880s they had become very nearly a flood. The exploits of Frederick Lugard illustrate the manner in which hunters, campaigners and administrators fused in the years immediately before and after the establishment of white rule. In 1890, the haphazard intrusions of hunters, prospectors, traders and missionaries had been replaced by the systematic invasion of the British South Africa Company. The Union Castle Line guides to East and southern Africa devoted a great deal of attention to African fauna, hunting and game laws. If game laws did little to hinder the white onslaught they were largely irrelevant to Africans. Africans were denied access to game primarily through the operation of gun laws.
The ivory trade of East Africa was of long standing. There are references to it in the earliest sources on East African history, like the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, compiled nearly 2,000 years ago. By the mid-nineteenth century Muslim caravan leaders and slavers were themselves penetrating East Africa, trading ivory, attempting to outwit African middlemen, and establishing hunting and trading 'colonies' in the interior. Fears of the decline and extinction of the East African ivory trade were firmly planted in the European mind by the writings of Joseph Thomson. After the First World War, many ivory hunters operated in the Belgian Congo and French Equatorial Africa. Richard Meinertzhagen had a tendency to equate human with animal bags, and it earned him a rebuke from the Commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate, Sir Charles Eliot.
Sport was an obsession in British India. And among sports those relating to hunting were the most highly regarded. The more opulent forms of Mughal hunting were enthusiastically taken over; the British no longer spectated or participated as guests; the elephant-borne tiger-shoot had become their own. There were two notable works on hunting in India in the early nineteenth century, those of Thomas Williamson and Daniel Johnson. Daniel Johnson published an account of Indian hunting in 1822 and dedicated it to the Court of Directors of the East India Company. Europeans seem to have been less eager to take up some of the other elite sports of India: hawking, the use of fierce greyhounds, or of captive cheetah to secure quarry. The British and the tiger seemed in some ways to be locked in conflict for command of the Indian environment.
By the end of the century the hunting and natural history elites were beginning to sound a note of alarm. This chapter concerns with international action, intense colonial legislative activity, and the development of a pressure group, the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE). Game laws were introduced into Natal in 1890, 1891 and 1906. African hunting techniques, the use of nets, springs, gins, traps, snares and sticks, were prohibited in 1891. Specialisation in land use, separation in settlement patterns, and the removal of hunting opportunities to remoter regions, had the effect of emphasising the shift towards the third level of imperial hunting, the Hunt. Territories with fewer settlers that were less open to hunting tourism, like Uganda and Northern Rhodesia, amended their legislation much less frequently.