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Empire. Adding detail, Hoare indicated the commercial possibilities and the steps already taken. He requested imperial co-operation in providing and maintaining landing fields and mooring masts along the proposed trunk route through Africa, and through India to Australia. Referring to ‘a long chain of great tensile power’ which aviation could forge, he argued that organised air transport was one of
The Great Exhibition of 1851, held in London’s Hyde Park, has long served as a symbol not only of Britain’s industrial development but also of its burgeoning Empire. 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. 1 Yet in
As one of five British cities John MacKenzie has identified as ‘economically bound up with Empire’, Liverpool evolved a distinctive imperial culture moulded by a local environment that made it unique amongst English cities. 1 The religious sectarianism and ‘the baleful shadow of Ireland which always lay across Liverpool’ divided its working class and had the effect of
The first life of Empire aviation ended in 1939. The loose arrangement of Commonwealth air services which succeeded it after the Second World War was driven by similar impulses to serve Britain’s world interests. Within a decade or so, however, vastly superior aeronautical technology all but obliterated Empire air tracks and altered flying experiences
dormant against Imperial Airways’. The public relations visit (by sea) to South Africa by Imperial Board member Col Barrett-Lennard, in 1930, had long since been overshadowed. 2 The best pickings from the executive retreat were incorporated in the memorandum that the Imperial Board submitted to the British Government in March 1933. The Future of Civil Air Communications in the Empire reviewed nine
• 1 • Empire and history writing: setting the scene There are two ways to lose oneself: by a walled segregation in the particular, or by a dilution in the ‘universal’. (Aimé Césaire)1 The quotation above opens up some of the main issues discussed in this book. At a moment when the French faced demands for decolonisation in Algeria and Indo-China, the Martiniquais intellectual and politician Aimé Césaire announced his resignation from the French Communist Party in a public ‘letter’ to Thorez, its leader. Césaire is best known for his development of the idea of
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a large part of Asia, most of Africa, and the islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean were imperial possessions. These large empires included not only the overseas territories of the European powers but also the new imperial possessions of the United States and Japan. The Americans – like the Russians and a number of
Seeley-esque a fit of absent-mindedness. Rather, Anglophone historians of empire have increasingly engaged in a debate about the nature of their craft: about what can and cannot be known about empire, and about the ways in which post-imperial western scholarship has imposed its own forms of knowledge and understanding on the postcolonial world. Much of this has been a response to the challenge posed by
Historical orthodoxy has it that the masses were indifferent to the British Empire in the inter-war years. Recently, however, a number of important studies have appeared which have challenged that view and sought to restore the imperial dimension to domestic British history. 1 What clues do we have, in the matter of Empire or indeed anything else, to that great intangible ‘the national
the reputation and standing of a museum among both academics and members of the general public alike. The collection, display and interpretation of material culture and zoological specimens came to be regarded as one of the primary functions of museums. Many of the people explored in the chapters that follow were the products of such thinking. While they worked in a diverse range of museum settings, they are connected by the way in which their careers intersected with the forces that shaped the British Empire