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partner and chairman of Elder Dempster in 1884 and worked to build Elder Dempster into the pre-eminent shipping firm for the British West Africa trade. Through the establishment of partnerships, stock purchases, and a shipping conference with its competitors, Elder Dempster established an almost complete monopoly over the carrying trade between the UK and West Africa by the turn of the twentieth century
Recent cultural studies have demonstrated the weakness of some of the fashionable theoretical positions adopted by scholars of imperialism in recent times. This book explores the diverse roles played by museums and their curators in moulding and representing the British imperial experience. The British Empire yielded much material for British museums, particularly in terms of ethnographic collections. The collection of essays demonstrates how individuals, their curatorial practices, and intellectual and political agendas influenced the development of a variety of museums across the globe. It suggests that Thomas Baines was deeply engaged with the public presentation, display and interpretation of material culture, and the dissemination of knowledge and information about the places he travelled. He introduced many people to the world beyond Norfolk. A discussion of visitor engagement with non-European material cultures in the provincial museum critiques the assumption of the pervasive nature of curatorial control of audience reception follows. The early 1900s, the New Zealand displays at world's fairs presented a vision of Maoriland, which often had direct Maori input. From its inception, the National Museum of Victoria performed the dual roles of research and public education. The book also discusses the collections at Australian War Memorial, Zanzibar Museum, and Sierra Leone's National Museum. The amateur enthusiasms and colonial museum policy in British West Africa are also highlighted. Finally, the book follows the journey of a single object, Tipu's Tiger, from India back to London.
required for chocolate manufacture continues to remain just out of sight. My purpose in this book has been to re-examine the history of chocolate at a local and a global level, linking together the legacies of early imperial exploitation and the continued global hegemony of western capitalists with the hard work of ordinary women in a British factory and on the cocoa farms of British West Africa
number of assumptions: an assumption, for example, that these cultural technologies of rule were applied evenly across different territories in the British Empire and at different periods, or that the establishment of museums in colonial contexts necessarily served colonial agendas. By examining the institutional histories of colonial-era museums in British West Africa, and of Sierra Leone’s National Museum in particular, it is possible to interrogate some of these received wisdoms and refine our understanding of the relationship
promise and its reality affected West African attempts to control diseases like malaria. Ultimately, while British imperial humanitarian policy often responded to British West African subjects’ appeals to intervene in the slave trade, other humanitarian concerns, including famine and disease, were regularly not prioritised by the colonial government, despite lobbying from the same groups. This chapter will contrast British
of ‘closer association’ without any promise of self-government. The French would remain in firm control of this ‘indivisible French Union’. Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, however, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control, preparing the way for both ‘self-determination and the federation of all West African
Across the continent of Africa, a web of laws silenced African speech. On the eve of World War II, a small, impoverished group of Africans and West Indians in London dared to imagine the end of British rule in Africa. Printing gave oppositions a voice, initially through broadsheets, tracts, pamphlets, later through books and articles. The group launched an anti-colonial campaign that used publishing as a pathway to liberation. These writers included West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Ras Makonnen, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leone's I. T. A. Wallace Johnson. They formed a part of International African Service Bureau (IASB), and the communists saw them as "generals without an army, they have no base and must depend on their pens". Padmore saw 'trusteeship' as a concept invoked as far back as the late nineteenth-century conferences that divided up Africa. Pan-Africa, a monthly periodical T. Ras Makonnen put out, reported that Richard Wright urged his listeners to form an international network of 'cultured progressives'. Labour-powered nationalism was to Padmore more than a drive for self-government. With the Gold Coast political ground so unsettled, neither Nkrumah nor the Convention People's Party (CPP) made Wright privy to their operations. Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control. In 1969, when a small American publisher reissued A History of Pan-African Revolt , James added to it an epilogue explaining the 'rapid decline of African nationalism'.
This chapter considers the role of British naval suppression in the production of the image of West Africa. The transformation of the slave trade from something that was central to Britain's relationship with Africa and from which it profited, into something that it was seeking to end, was central to this process. According to Forbes, the British had signed an anti-slave trade treaty with King Fano-Toro in 1846. Among all the anecdotes and general observations about Africa, some suppressionist writers did seek to probe deeper into the societies they encountered to provide more detailed understanding of historical events, political structures and economic systems. Following the publicity elicited by an intense pamphlet war, a Royal Commission was sent to investigate the healthness of Britain's West African settlements, including Sierra Leone and the Gambia.
avoided; at best its negative effects could be curbed. Such was the view taken by its 1944 Plan of Propaganda to British West Africa. According to the authors of this plan, demobilized soldiers would not willingly return to the land – ‘discontent will almost inevitably ensue unless the prospects of farm life can be rendered reasonably attractive’. 9 This view was firmly held by those involved with
A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this topic is researched and understood, and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the sociocultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.