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Imperial and colonial settlers and sojourners (temporary residents) required places to live. Their residences were built in an extraordinary hierarchy of scale and quality, well represented by the great gulfs seen in plantation economies. Elsewhere, urban residences sprang up in large numbers, often reflecting the universalising of the bungalow style originating in India, and more rarely, terraces in inner colonial cities. As the nineteenth century progressed and the great explosion in many colonial economies occurred (for example, though the exploitation of gold in Australia and southern Africa), cities grew to a considerable extent, particularly after the development of transport systems – railways, trams and later, buses – stimulated the creation of suburbs. In many places, inner cities became crowded and the notion of the City Improvement Trust was created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to alleviate some of the problems this caused. This idea appeared on several continents, but sometimes introduced as many problems as it set out to alleviate, particularly when applied to the zones of indigenous residents in India and elsewhere in Asia.
The global expansion of empire prompted the globalisation of The Christian religion and its buildings. In the British case, this has to be seen in terms of the ‘four nations’ of the British Isles. Throughout the empire there was a struggle between Anglicanism, which attempted to assert its authority as the English established Church, and the other denominations, notably the Church of Scotland, which was also established. The chapter examines the spread of Anglican cathedrals and churches, of Scottish churches and churches of other denominations, as well as mission stations, with their churches and many other buildings, including hospitals and schools. In addition to the Christian religion, freemasonry expanded throughout the empire, creating a large number of lodges of the various ‘rites’. The ‘friendly societies’ were also significant in this respect. The chapter surveys the various different styles in which these buildings were constructed as well as the struggles that attended their creation. As always, the racial dimension is central to the discussion, in the attempted conversion of indigenous peoples and of their acceptability within churches that were, in many cases, originally built for Europeans.
This chapter seeks to take little-noticed examples of colonial cities to explore insights into the processes recounted in the earlier chapters. Valletta is taken as an example of an island colony in Europe with a remarkable history, which the British took over during the Napoleonic wars and significantly modified as a naval base and staging post on the route to India. Rangoon is a very special case, since almost nothing has been published on this city because of the particular conditions of the post-Second World War history of Burma/Myanmar, yet it presents a particularly illuminating instance of the foundation and growth of a city together with the manner in which it is presented today. The creation of new capitals was an extraordinary phenomenon of the late British Empire and the rest of the chapter examines three of them: Canberra for the Commonwealth of Australia (founded in 1901), New Delhi, and Lusaka in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Canberra had a very slow and tortured origin and development, in some respects only coming into its own in the twenty-first century. New Delhi has received a great deal of attention, but it remains an intriguing case and some aspects of its creation and emergence as ‘heritage’ have been ignored. Lusaka is a highly significant case of an African new capital which offers many insights into imperial attitudes, the survival of extraordinary racial attitudes and the impractical belief in the continuing force of colonialism.
During the years after David Livingstone's death it became the powerful myth underpinning the outburst of missionary enterprise in Africa, embracing all denominations, but perhaps particularly associated with Scottish missions, prominently in Nyasaland/Malawi. When Livingstone's body was returned to Britain after the heroic journey across Africa of his followers, led by James Chuma, Abdullah Susi and Jacob Wainwright, he was welcomed into an English Valhalla. The missionary Alexander Hetherwick subtitled his memoirs, ending in 1928, with the assertion 'How Livingstone's Dream Came True'. The association of the name of Livingstone with resistance to colonial rule can certainly be charted through the activities of many of the Scottish missionaries in Malawi. Missionaries had to grapple with disappointing post-colonial political developments as they have described in an oral history project, interviewing Scottish missionaries who worked in Central Africa, mainly in Zambia but also in Malawi.
This chapter contextualises the way collecting from military campaigns can be viewed as the acquisition of trophies parallel to the trophy collecting of hunting. From the eighteenth century onwards, hunting and shooting were seen as the image of war and were considered essential training for campaigning. Hunting produced natural history trophies which became a central collecting interest for museums, messes, clubs and private homes. The collecting of ethnographic trophies was closely related to this phenomenon in contemporary understanding, as part of a comprehensive approach to collecting the natural history of the world and its peoples. Colonial military campaigning was often associated with hunting expeditions and trophy collecting of both sorts took place. In the nineteenth century colonial campaigning and hunting stepped up its incidence and geographical range. Improvements in transport technology and auction-house infrastructures and advertising facilitated the dispersal of such materials. This chapter discusses the significance and meaning of such collecting in several ways: for the development of imperial ideologies, for the arousal of popular interests, and for the emergence of natural historical, ethnographic, anthropological and ideological concerns. It also examines how it came to be significant for the instruction of a wider audience, becoming part of imperial propaganda.
It is apparent, for example, that the development of a fresh interest in a four-nations approach to the history of Britain, and, more particularly in this chapter the British Empire, is connected with the dramatic changes in British constitutional arrangements since the late 1990s. This chapter presents a survey of a modern historiography in progress. The Irish Treaty of 1922 led to a great deal of soul-searching about its significance for the development of the constitutional arrangements of both Britain and the empire. Scotland was particularly important in all of this, and the schismatic tendencies of Scottish Presbyterianism greatly stimulated the energies of overseas activity. Moreover, it is increasingly apparent that the continuing presence of large numbers of people who continue to identify themselves as Irish, Scottish or Welsh, even at times English throughout the world, continues to influence the shape and content of those ethnicities.
Britain's overseas empire had a profound impact on people in the United Kingdom, their domestic spaces and rituals, and their perceptions of, and attitudes towards, the wider world. This book considers how a whole range of cultural products - from paintings to architecture - were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. The churches and missionary societies were important in transmitting visual propaganda for their work, through their magazines, through lectures and magic lantern slides, through exhibitions and publications such as postcards. The book offers an overview of the main context in which four continents iconography was deployed after 1800: the country houses of the British elite. Publication, and subsequent distribution and consumption, offered a forum for exploration endeavours to enter public consciousness. James Cook's expeditions were particularly important in bringing exploration to a wider public audience, and the published accounts derived from them offer strong evidence of the interest in exploration at all levels of society. The exhibition of empire, typically associated with ambition, pride and expertise, also included an unruly genre: the satirical peace print. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars resulted in the eclipse of the French, Spanish and Holy Roman Empires, and Britain's emergence as a 'global, naval, commercial, and imperial superpower'. Numerous scholars in recent years have noted the centrality of the Indian exhibits in the Crystal Palace and emphasised the exhibition's role in promoting commodities from Britain's colonies.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores and contextualises the ways in which the practices, results and complexities of Britain's extra-European activities were 'exhibited' to British people. It shows how the authorities in Zanzibar tried to use the opportunity presented by the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley to present carefully calibrated images about the protectorate to the British public. The book sheds light on the complex interplay between 'metropole' and 'periphery', both within the United Kingdom and in the wider Empire beyond. The country's imperial status seemed to pervade almost every aspect of British culture from exhibitions, panoramas and theatrical performances to art, literature and music. Such influences and impacts were multiple and complex, and frequently became deeply embedded in British domestic culture.
The relationship between Scotland and the British Empire in the twentieth century was wide-ranging. This book represents ground-breaking research in the field of Scotland's complex and often-changing relationship with the British Empire in the period. The contours of Scottish intercontinental migration were significantly redrawn during the twentieth century as a consequence of two world wars. The book reveals the apparent means used to assess the complexities of linking places of birth to migration and to various modern attempts to appeal to ethnic diasporas. The strange case of jute brings out some paradoxical dimensions to Scotland's relationship with England and the empire in the twentieth century. The book argues that the Scottish immigrants' perceptions of class, race and gender were equally important for interpreting the range of their experiences in the British Columbia. The mainstay of organised anti-colonialist critique and mobilisation, in Scotland lay in socialist and social democratic groups. The book examines how the Scottish infantry regiments, and their popular and political constituencies, responded to rapidly reducing circumstances in the era of decolonisation. Newspapers such as The Scotsman, The Glasgow Herald, and the Daily Record brought Africa to the Scottish public with their coverage of Mau Mau insurgency and the Suez Crisis. The book looks into the Scottish cultural and political revival by examining the contributions of David Livingstone. It also discusses the period of the Hamilton by-election of 1967 and the three referenda of 1979, 1997 and 2014 on devolution and independence.