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When members of that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church – the 'Tory Party at prayer' – encountered the far-flung settler empire, they found it a strange and intimidating place. Anglicanism's conservative credentials seemed to have little place in developing colonies; its established status, secure in England, would crumble in Ireland and was destined never to be adopted in the 'White Dominions'. By 1850, however, a global ‘Anglican Communion’ was taking shape. This book explains why Anglican clergymen started to feel at home in the empire. Between 1790 and 1860 the Church of England put in place structures that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. Though Church expansion was far from being a regulated and coordinated affair, the book argues that churchmen did find ways to accommodate Anglicans of different ethnic backgrounds and party attachments in a single broad-based ‘national’ colonial Church. The book details the array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the men and money that facilitated Church expansion; it also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. The colonial Church that is presented in this book will be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The book shows how the colonial Church played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and state.
This book collects eleven original essays in the cultural history of the British Empire since the eighteenth century. It is geographically capacious, taking in the United Kingdom, India, West Africa, Hong Kong, and Australia, as well as sites of informal British influence such as the Ottoman Empire and southern China.
The book considers the ways in which British culture circulated within what John Darwin has called the British “world system”. In this, the book builds on existing imperial scholarship while innovating in several ways: it focuses on the movement of ideas and cultural praxis, whereas Darwin has focused mostly on imperial structures —financial, demographic, and military. The book examines the transmission, reception, and adaptation of British culture in the Metropole, the empire and informal colonial spaces, whereas many recent scholars have considered British imperial influence on the Metropole alone. It examines Britain's Atlantic and Asian imperial experiences from the eighteenth to the twentieth century together.
Through focusing on political ideology, literary movements, material culture, marriage, and the construction of national identities, the essays demonstrate the salience of culture in making a “British World”.
This book introduces the reader to emerging research in the broad field of 'imperial migration' and shows how this 'new' migration scholarship had developed our understanding of the British World. This is done through an analysis of some of former colonies of British Empire such as Australia, Canada, India and Zambia. The book focuses on the ideas of Reverend Thomas Malthus of how population movements presaged forces within sectors of a pre-industrial economy. The formation of national and imperial identities along racial lines in the mid-nineteenth century is covered by an analysis of the mid-nineteenth century British censuses. The clergy played a pivotal role in the importation and diffusion of a sense of British identity (and morality) to Australian churchgoers. The resistance and accommodation of Welsh Presbyterianism in Eastern Bengal is investigated through the varieties of engagement with Indian Christians and non-Christians. The book argues that Asian migration and the perceived threat it posed to the settler colonies was an issue which could unite these seemingly incongruent elements of the British World. Child migration has become a very sensitive and politically charged issue, and the book examines one of the lesser studied child migration agencies, the Middlemore Children's Emigration Homes. The book also deals with the cultural cross-currents in the construction of an Anglo-Canadian or 'Britannic' national identity. The white settlers' decisions to stay on after independence was granted to Zambia are instructive as it fills an important gap in our understanding of Africa's colonial legacy.
Both writers and critics of the British World have primarily focused on the white inhabitants within it; the role of non-whites and their impact remains problematic. It is only by studying the reactions to Asian migration, however, that historians can understand why, over time, the concept of empire became less compelling to the settler colonies and why alternative imagined
Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860-1911 examines the ritual space of nineteenth-century royal tours of empire and the diverse array of historical actors who participated in them. The book is a tale of royals who were ambivalent and bored partners in the project of empire; colonial administrators who used royal ceremonies to pursue a multiplicity of projects and interests or to imagine themselves as African chiefs or heirs to the Mughal emperors; local princes and chiefs who were bullied and bruised by the politics of the royal tour, even as some of them used the tour to symbolically appropriate or resist British cultural power; and settlers of European descent and people of colour in the empire who made claims on the rights and responsibilities of imperial citizenship and as co-owners of Britain’s global empire. Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World suggests that the diverse responses to the royal tours of the nineteenth century demonstrate how a multi-centred British-imperial culture was forged in the empire and was constantly made and remade, appropriated and contested. In this context, subjects of empire provincialized the British Isles, centring the colonies in their political and cultural constructions of empire, Britishness, citizenship, and loyalty.
This volume brings together cutting-edge research by some of the most innovative scholars of early modern Britain. Inspired in part by recent studies of the early modern ‘public sphere’, the twelve chapters collected here reveal an array of political and religious practices that can serve as a foundation for new narratives of the period. The practices considered range from deliberation and inscription to publication and profanity. The narratives under construction range from secularization to the rise of majority rule. Many of the authors also examine ways British developments were affected by and in turn influenced the world outside of Britain.
Explanations of working-class politics in Australia and Britain have traditionally been heavily rooted in domestic 'bread and butter', socio-economic factors, including the much-debated issue of social class. 'Traditional' and 'revisionist' accounts have greatly advanced our knowledge and understanding of labour movements in general and labour politics in particular. This book offers a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the neglected influences of nation, empire and race. The study is about the development and electoral fortunes of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the British Labour Party (BLP) from their formative years of the 1900s to the elections of 2010. Based upon extensive primary and secondary source-based research in Britain and Australia over several years, the book makes a new and original contribution to the fields of labour, imperial and 'British world' history. It offers the challenging conclusion that the forces of nation, empire and race exerted much greater influence upon Labour politics in both countries than suggested by 'traditionalists' and 'revisionists' alike. Labour sought a more democratic, open and just society, but, unlike the ALP, it was not a serious contender for political and social power. In both countries, the importance attached to the politics of loyalism is partly related to questions of place and space. In both Australia and Britain the essential strength of the emergent Labour parties was rooted in the trade unions. The book also presents three core arguments concerning the influences of nation, empire, race and class upon Labour's electoral performance.
This book examines the dissemination and exchange of ideas within the British world between 1763 and 1997. In particular, it is concerned with looking at the ebb and flow of concepts integral to the circulation of imperial culture, as well as the beliefs, practices and outcomes associated with them. In doing so, it builds on two key developments in scholarship since the turn of the century
from the former settler dominions, the United States and the United Kingdom have participated in a series of conferences established to explore the making and remaking of Britishness across a ‘British World’. This abstraction, which was open to a variety of interpretations both within Britain and its overseas empire, extends well beyond the physical confines of those regions on the map painted red
territorializing and deterritorializing tendencies.’ 10 Examining the specific nature and precise mechanisms of different types of long-distance connections presents a more fruitful approach to understanding the transnational forces of empire than the catch-all concept of globalisation. Recent work on the ‘British world’, for instance, emphasises how multiple communities across the