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postcolonial scholars since the 1970s to what were once considered to be some of the verities of European imperial history in general: its narratives of modernity and economic expansion; the metropolitan locus of ideas of governance and civil society; and the encounter with indigenous peoples, who were perceived as possessing none of these things. These debates inform our present concern with place
In 1863 the British government in India built the ‘Mutiny Memorial’ to commemorate those lost in the so-called ‘Indian Mutiny’ (or ‘Rebellion’) of 1857–58–an uprising of Indian peasants, soldiers and aristocrats that seriously challenged British power in north India. Built to evoke the gothic medievalism of a European church spire, the tapering
’s term) 4 and the spread of Anglo-Saxon peoples and sensibilities. A plethora of travellers posited New Zealand and Australia as ‘New Homes for the Old Country’, to borrow Baden-Powell’s book title. 5 These locations promised modernity, space, and opportunity for Britons who were dissatisfied with the rapid industrialisation throughout Europe. Among the Australasian colonies, New
so that the people might know beforehand where they were to go, in which towns and in which houses they were to live. The workmen’s dwellings would resemble neither ‘those melancholy workmen’s barracks of European towns’, nor those ‘miserable rows of shanties which surround factories’. 15 They would present a beautiful uniform appearance, and the detached houses in little
were in the forefront of modern civilization. The conquest of the Boer republics in South Africa presented a slightly unusual case of imperial expansion in that the enemy were of European origin. This lent a defensive edge to British rhetoric since, in continental Europe, the war was often seen as a human rights issue – the independence of a small proud nation against the might of British imperialism
several worlds which the multifaceted Cunninghame Graham inhabited: those of socialist and labour politics, of nationalism, of cultural and especially literary circles, and of Scotland’s diaspora. None of them, however, can be given their full due here. The mainstay of organised anti-colonialist critique and mobilisation, in Scotland as almost everywhere among Europe’s
the summer timetable for the airline’s European services in 1928 and 1929 was incongruous, premature and exaggerated. African air links were still a dream, yet even the European timetable presented an earthworm’s view of an enormous lion standing imposingly in front of a fluffy white cumulus cloud suspended in an orange sky. For its 1931/32 winter timetable to Egypt, Iraq, India
called upon Buddhist missionaries to go out into towns and villages to campaign against Christianity. Modernism revolutionised attitudes to suffering, poverty, nirvana and the like. Whereas traditional Buddhism represented ‘suffering’ as ‘cosmic suffering’, ‘modernists’ borrowed ideas from Marx, Nietzsche and European Christian Socialists to transform it into ‘social suffering’. Similarly the ‘modernist’ politician Thakin Kodaw Hmain assured Buddhists that if they fought for independence from British rule they could gain
hard to distinguish one European from another. They all looked, sounded and smelled the same, lived in the same tree-lined civil lines (the more prosperous section of colonial Mandalay in which European Civilians lived), retreated to Kalaw during the hot season, had their babies in Maymyo Civil Hospital and compared ayahs and punkah-wallahs over cups of Earl Grey tea. In times of danger, Europeans closed rank and huddled together for mutual protection. 7 The Wesleyan missionaries enjoyed hobnobbing with the colonial top