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Changing approaches to hunting constitute an important theme in human history. This book uses hunting as one focus for the complex interaction of Europeans with Africans and Indians. It seeks to illuminate the nature of imperial power when exercised in the relationship between humans and the natural world. The main geographical emphasis is on southern, Central and East Africa, as well as South Asia, but reference is made to other parts of Africa and Asia and to the effects of white settlement elsewhere. The great hunters of the ancient world offered protection to their subjects' life and limb and to their crops by destroying wild predators. In Britain the nineteenth-century hunting cult had an extraordinary range of cultural manifestations. Pheasant covert, grouse moor and deer forest, explored and dominated by humans in the Hunt, became prime elements in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Hunting was an important part of the pre-colonial economy and diet of many African peoples. The importance of hunting was very apparent at the court of Mzilikazi, king of the Ndebele. 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. This apotheosis of the hunting mentality survived at least into the inter-war years and was indeed inherited by the Indianised Indian Civil Service and army in the years leading up to independence. Hunting remains important to those who continue to exercise global power.
The book shows how people have come to approach the writing of imperial histories in the early twenty-first century. It explores the social and political contexts that informed the genesis and development of the Studies in Imperialism series, and the conceptual links it has sought to forge between empire and metropolitan culture. The book provides an insightful account of John MacKenzie's 'Orientalism': the problems of 'power' and 'agency'. The 'MacKenziean moment' needs to be read historically, as a product of the 'delayed arrival of decolonising sensibilities', where contemporary popular phenomena and new types of scholarship integrated Britain and its empire. Sexuality made early appearances in the Series through the publication of 'Empire and Sexuality'. MacKenzie's 'Empire of Nature', 'Imperialism and the Natural World', and 'Museums and Empire' convey the impact of his scholarship in the themes of exploration, environment and empire. The historical geographies of British colonialism have enjoyed a prominent place in the Series, and the book explores the ways in which different 'spatial imaginations' have been made possible. Discussions on colonial policing during the depression years, and on immigrant welfare during and after decolonisation, take their cue from MacKenzie's European Empires and the People. The later nineteenth century witnessed the interaction of many diasporas, which in turn produced new modes of communication. By dealing with the idea of the 'Third British Empire' and the role of the Indian press during and after the British Raj, the book repositions British imperial histories within a broader set of global transformations.
MacKenzie and the Studies in Imperialism series appeared on the scene. Their impact on how we think about the relationship of exploration, empire and the environment is considerable. No single work was more important and innovative in this regard than MacKenzie’s The Empire of Nature (1988). 5 In this book, MacKenzie took up a topic that had been hiding in plain sight – the British landed elite’s fondness
-Century Scotland (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2017). Patrick Duff (1742–1803) was a high-ranking officer in the Bengal Artillery and an avid hunter. See also V. R. Mandala, Shooting a Tiger: Big-Game Hunting and Conservation in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 4 J. M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), Chapter 7. The memoir literature of hunters in India is very extensive indeed. To a certain degree, the fascination with hunting was also linked to
This book sets the context for a detailed exploration of the academic debate about the origins of the British empire, and outlines and engages with a key interpretation or approach to the subject. It gives a brief outline of the growth of the empire from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, together with a survey of various theoretical explanations and justifications offered by commentators from the early mercantilists, to apologist historians of the late Victorian period such as Froude and Seeley. The book considers more closely the problems surrounding the concept of imperialism, and its many definitions. It also considers why the British among the various continental European empires, has attracted so much interest and controversy among historians. The White Dominions, particularly Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the beneficiaries of such liberal concession, which was granted on the assumption that the predominantly white and British inhabitants of these colonies needed and deserved the right of self government. It is unsurprising, therefore, given the kaleidoscopic quality of the British empire, its ethnic and cultural diversity and the baffling varieties of its formal and informal rule, that historians of imperialism have come to regard it as the richest source of insights into the subject. It has become a testing ground for theoretical models of imperialism, a function it seems likely to continue to serve.
Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 180. 8 John M. MacKenzie, The empire of nature: Hunting, conservation and British imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988 ), p. 45
This book explores for the first time women’s leading roles in animal protection in nineteenth-century Britain. Victorian women founded pioneering bodies such as the Battersea Dogs’ Home, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the first anti-vivisection society. They intervened directly to stop abuses, promoted animal welfare, and schooled the young in humane values via the Band of Mercy movement. They also published literature that, through strongly argued polemic or through imaginative storytelling, notably in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, showed man’s unjustifiable cruelty to animals. In all these enterprises, they encountered opponents who sought to discredit and thwart their efforts by invoking age-old notions of female ‘sentimentality’ or ‘hysteria’, which supposedly needed to be checked by ‘masculine’ pragmatism, rationality and broadmindedness, especially where men’s field sports were concerned. To counter any public perception of extremism, conservative bodies such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for long excluded women from executive roles, despite their crucial importance as donors and grassroots activists. However, women’s growing opportunities for public work in philanthropic projects and the development of militant feminism, running in parallel with campaigns for the vote, gave them greater boldness in expressing their distinctive view of animal–human relations, in defiance of patriarchy. In analysing all these historic factors, the book unites feminist perspectives, especially constructions of gender, with the fast-developing field of animal–human history.
This book begins from the assumption that race and empire have been central to early modern and modern British history. It addresses the question of how histories written in the past, in different political times, dealt with, considered, or avoided and disavowed Britain's imperial role and issues of difference. The book considers how we might re-think British history in the light of transnational, trans-imperial and cross-cultural analysis, for British history may come to look very different once it is decentered from the national and placed within an imperial and global framework. It, in the contrary, starts from the premise that the denial of racial and ethnic conflicts inside the United Kingdom together with the absence of race as a central category of analysis in historical writing has significantly limited our understanding of British history. In the final part of the book Kathleen Wilson, Antoinette Burton and Geoff Eley all pose fundamental issues about the terrains of contemporary imperial and domestic history writing and the challenges of transnational and trans-imperial work. Wilson uses her eighteenth-century case studies to think about the ways in which mobility across space and time unsettle the idea of the nation as a collective experience. She asks how the English and British overseas contributed to notions of nationality, moving away from the writings of those who thought of themselves as historians to the writings of those who were crafting new notions of national history and identity in their reports and letters from liminal sites of empire.
–7. 16 John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), 168. 17 Edward Blunt, The ICS: The Indian Civil Service (London, 1937 ), 225. 18
John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism , Manchester, 1988. 15 Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanical Gardens , New York, 1979. 16