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Colonial war played a vital part in transforming the reputation of the military and placing it on a standing equal to that of the navy. The book is concerned with the interactive culture of colonial warfare, with the representation of the military in popular media at home, and how these images affected attitudes towards war itself and wider intellectual and institutional forces. It sets out to relate the changing image of the military to these fundamental facts. For the dominant people they were an atavistic form of war, shorn of guilt by Social Darwinian and racial ideas, and rendered less dangerous by the increasing technological gap between Europe and the world. Attempts to justify and understand war were naturally important to dominant people, for the extension of imperial power was seldom a peaceful process. The entertainment value of war in the British imperial experience does seem to have taken new and more intensive forms from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. Themes such as the delusive seduction of martial music, the sketch of the music hall song, powerful mythic texts of popular imperialism, and heroic myths of empire are discussed extensively. The first important British war correspondent was William Howard Russell (1820-1907) of The Times, in the Crimea. The 1870s saw a dramatic change in the representation of the officer in British battle painting. Up to that point it was the officer's courage, tactical wisdom and social prestige that were put on display.
Imperial history and the imperial idea have been examined almost entirely in a centrifugal manner, as the radiation of influences from Britain into its wider hinterland. This book explores the manifestations of the imperial idea, from the trappings of royalty through writers like G. A. Henty to the humble cigarette card. It uses popular imperialism as a focus for the examination of the theatre, the cinema, education, juvenile literature, imperial exhibitions, youth movements, and a variety of imperial propaganda bodies between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The most aggressive and innovative advertisers of the day were companies dependent on the imperial economic nexus, in tea, chocolate, soaps and oils, tobacco, meat extracts, shipping, and later rubber. Middle and upper-class attachment to the music hall developed out of its success among the working class. Radio conveyed a sense of the unity of Empire, at least in the public mind, such as the Edwardian imperial societies had found unattainable. After the Second World War the British Broadcasting Corporation (B.B.C.) continued to present a vision of a beneficent and regenerative Empire. The great exhibitions which from the 1880s came to be dominated by the imperial theme offer the most striking examples of both conscious and unconscious approaches to imperial propaganda. By the 1880s the new morality had come to be wedded to the late nineteenth-century world view and was suffused with the patriotic, racial, and militarist elements which together made up the new popular imperialism.
Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.
Museums were an expression of the western conviction in the onward march of the rational. Local civilisations were also the prime focus in other Asian imperial museums. This is the first book that examines the origins and development of museums in six major regions if the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyses museum histories in thirteen major centres in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and South-East Asia, setting them into the economic and social contexts of the cities and colonies in which they were located. Museums in Canada have a longer, though somewhat chequered, history than elsewhere in the British Empire. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto and the Royal British Columbia museum in Victoria were two notable, yet very different, expressions of imperial expansiveness . The book then overviews two representative museums: the South African Museum (SAM) in Cape Town and the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. The origins and development of the National Museum of Victoria (NMV) in Melbourne, South Australian Museum (SAuM) and Australian Museum (AM) are then discussed. New Zealand/Aotearoa, with its Canterbury Museum and War Memorial Museum, has discrete origins as a colony in the nineteenth century. Imperial museums in Asia were unquestionably distinctive compared with those of the territories of white settlement. A number of key themes emerge: the development of elites within colonial towns; the emergence of the full range of cultural institutions associated with this; and the modification of the key scientific ideas of the age.
Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this more true than in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late-Victorian and Edwardian times in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education and the iconography of popular art. Nineteenth-century music hall was known as the 'fount of patriotism'. A heroic and romantic vision of Empire helped to widen the appeal of British imperialism, which newspaper and magazine editors insisted on communicating to the new mass reading public. Juvenile fiction included Victorian children's books, and very few seemed deliberately anti-imperialist. The book offers a bridge between the pre-1914 period and the interwar years and between the public school and state school systems. It discusses the case of Peter Lobengula as a focus for racial attributes in late Victorian and Edwardian times. The imperial economic vision lay ready to hand for the publicists and public relations men who saw the Empire Marketing Board as one of the great opportunities in the inter-war years to develop their craft. The book also argues that whereas the Scout movement was created in the atmosphere of defensive Empire in the Edwardian period, Scouting ideology underwent a significant change in the post-war years. Girl Guides remind us that the role of girls and women in youth organisations and imperial ideologies has been too little studied.
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 European scramble for colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by rather more than the interests of an elite, aristocratic and bourgeois. This book is about the 'colonisation of consciousness'. It surveys in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book offers six case studies on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, providing parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The book demonstrates the inter-war years that saw the stepping up of imperial propaganda throughout the surviving imperial powers. Inspired by the directions of research pioneered by John MacKenzie, specialists of the French Empire started to combine methodologies from social and cultural history to revise the perception of French popular imperialism. Germany's imperialism is analysed along the axes of mobility and migration, 'race' and the sciences, commodities and markets, the missions and imperialist social formations, and the vast field of popular culture. What sets popular imperialism in Belgium apart from others is the remarkable yet ironic reverence reserved for Leopold II. Power rivalries, ingenious if tricky diplomacy, and Leopold's tenacity resulted in recognition of his rule over much of the Congo around the time of the Berlin conference. So far as the peoples of Europe were concerned, the imperial experience helped, paradoxically, to further 'Eurocentrism' and install the naturalisation of Europeanness as 'whiteness'.
The British Empire contributed greatly to the globalising of western buildings, towns and cities across the world. The requirements of security necessitated the construction of forts and barracks everywhere, while the need for mobility and ceremonial led to the use of large numbers of tents. As towns and cities developed, building types required for imperial rule, the operations of colonial economies and the comfort and cultural edification of Europeans appeared everywhere. These included government houses, town halls, courthouses, assembly and parliament buildings, company headquarters, customs houses and hotels. As the white bourgeoisie became a major global class, their representative buildings, such as clubs, libraries, museums, theatres, religious institutions, mission stations and schools, also spread worldwide. Some of these were designed for the dissemination of European culture to indigenous peoples, as well as the proselytisation of Christianity. Imperial rulers, their officials and troops additionally required particular settlements for leisure, recreation and the restoration of health, and these included hill stations in many colonies. The new technologies of the age, such as the telegraph and railways, also generated significant structures, widely dispersed. In addition to the great public and civic buildings, residential accommodation was created for Europeans, servants and workers. The result was a striking built environment which offers many insights into the nature, character and social and economic development of imperial rule, not least in the patterns of racial and class inclusion and exclusion which such buildings represented. It is an environment which remains key to the understanding of the modern world, and one which has survived, often through the modern fascination with ‘heritage’ as well as through its incorporation into new postcolonial arrangements.
Frontiers used to be thought of as a readily defined concept, a 'contact zone' between territories, peoples, cultures. Frontiers can be both tangible and imaginary, at once apparently definable and utterly nebulous. But their existence has ever been a source of fascination, stimulation and inspiration. This chapter focuses on the relationship between this reflection on frontiers and the Studies in Imperialism series. General editors may have some influence in commissioning books that help to guide the directions in which a series travels. The Series has always proceeded on the basis that it is open to all, that it has no hard ideological position. There have been considerations of the events and travails of migration through diaries and letters, of the experiences of different forms of identity. During the almost thirty years of the Studies in Imperialism series, terminologies have moved forward. The chapter explains how influential has the Series been.
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores the histories of development of shipbuilding industries and shipping in Liverpool. The Liverpool merchants and shippers continued to mess with slavery and slave-grown products after British abolition legislation. The imperial connections of both Liverpool and Glasgow started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The initial growth of these cities was inseparably bound up with these Atlantic trades, as well as, but not necessarily dominated by, the slave trade. London the port and London the seat of government often stimulated resistance, even if its onward march as the administrative, commercial and financial cynosure of the British Empire became almost unstoppable. The arrival of non-European immigrant communities illustrated the ways in which empire set up powerful invented traditions of ethnic employment specialisms.