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months. Hundreds lost their lives for the cause in which they believed, as did their wives and children. While the advancement of medicine and hygiene by the end of the nineteenth century may have lessened the death rate, sickness remained a fact of everyday life. Housing Missionaries would have experienced the realities of life in India to a greater extent than
colonial issues were raised but empire was part of the everyday life of the English, part of their imaginative landscape, part of their sense of themselves, part of their mapping of the globe. To be English was to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and a master-race, masters indeed of a quarter of the world’s population. Englishmen could dream of ruling ‘natives’ in India, making fortunes in
. 3 Nicholas Thomas , The Return of Curiosity: What Museums Are Good For in the 21st Century ( London : Reaktion Books , 2016 ), p. 45 . 4 See Michel de Certeau , The Practice of Everyday Life
. Stephen Brooke argues the importance of reading affective ecologies – the interactions between human emotion and space, both public and private – into the history of everyday life in London. 14 Conviviality in musical environments was forged partly by tapping into this ecology, often through the consumption of the space in which it was produced. In Brixton, young people consumed
prerogatives of high politics or the foreign policy concerns of the ‘official mind’. Imperialism was instead woven into the fabric of everyday life for Britons living in both colonies and the metropole across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Catherine Hall has demonstrated, empire as a cultural project was ‘visible in innumerable ways’ across Britain at the turn of the twentieth century
to legitimise itself through self-characterisation as rule of law and social reform. 2 Significant legislation pertaining to social reform which sought to penetrate deeply into the everyday life and culture of Indians (in particular of Bengal) marked the passage of British rule in India. This legislation involved such intimate and private aspects of life as marriage, motherhood
the Politics of Everyday Life’, in Lila Abu-Lughod and Catherine A. Lutz (eds), Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 1–23; Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry (2011), 37 (3), pp. 434–72. 6 Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker
place being studied, during which time anthropologists were expected, as much as possible, to immerse themselves in everyday life. This methodology had been largely developed in the ‘colonial encounter’. 18 However, there was also a history of fieldwork undertaken in Britain itself, influenced by the colonial science of anthropology, whereby researchers spent time with working
Much of the world today is governed by the clock. The project to incorporate the globe within a matrix of hours, minutes and seconds demands recognition as one of the most significant manifestations of Europe's universalising will. This book is an examination of the ways that western-European and specifically British concepts and rituals of time were imposed on other cultures as a fundamental component of colonisation during the nineteenth century. It explores the intimate relationship between the colonisation of time and space in two British settler-colonies and its instrumental role in the exportation of Christianity, capitalism and modernity. Just as the history of colonialism is often written without much reference to time, the history of time is frequently narrated without due reference to colonialism. Analysing colonial constructions of 'Aboriginal time', the book talks about pre-colonial zodiacs that have been said to demonstrate an encyclopedic oral knowledge of the night sky. Temporal control was part of everyday life during the process of colonization. Discipline and the control of human movements were channelled in a temporal as well as a spatial manner. In the colony of Victoria, missions and reserves sought to confine Aboriginal people within an unseen matrix of temporal control, imposing curfews and restrictions which interrupted the regular flow of pre-colonial patterns, rituals and calendars. Christianity had brought civilised conceptions of time to the Xhosa. Reports of Sabbath observance were treated by Britain's humanitarians as official evidence of missionary success in planting the seeds of Christianity, commerce and civilization.
). 2 For this aspect of everyday life in Louisbourg, see A. J. B. Johnston, Life and Religion at Louisbourg, 1713–1758 (Montreal and Kingston/London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996). 3 See Johnston, Endgame , pp. 13–14; Voltaire, ‘Précis du siècle de Louis XV’, in Œuvres historiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 1462