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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.
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.
for British museums, particularly in terms of ethnographic collections. 7 In Liverpool for example, William Brown was ‘aware that ships trading out of Liverpool would provide opportunities to add much that [wa]s valuable’ to his nascent museum in the city. 8 In assessing the impact of the British imperial experiences on museums and their collections, Tim Barringer has argued that ‘the acquisition of objects from areas of the world in which Britain had a colonial or proto-colonial political and military interests
English novel has registered the British imperial experience as well as the retreat from world dominance more specifically, is melancholic. Faced with the loss of empire’s moral legitimacy after 1945, the English novel (let stand English society) shows clear signs of having avoided, repressed or erased the full implications of what that loss entailed at a variety of different levels, emotional, psychological, social, cultural and ethical. It has not allowed itself properly to mourn the diminishment of global power, nor fully to process the trauma represented by a
This chapter examines the role of Irish soldiers in British India during the long nineteenth century. Rather than focusing on familiar representations of the Irish soldier abroad, this chapter links Irish service in the Empire to contemporary imperial ideology and changing patterns of economic and political thought. Ireland was central to British imperial expansion in the East, a point vital to our understanding of the multifaceted and pluralized nature of the British imperial experience, an experience which embedded Irish Catholics into British India. This chapter draws attention to the close, informal bonds that existed between Irish individuals within the imperial armed forces in India, which gradually gave rise to soldier networks based along ethnic lines. This was bolstered by the presence of Irish Catholic chaplains, stationed in British military cantonments. These networks were important conduits of cultural, financial and political interchange between Irish, Indian and Eurasian communities. These networks transmitted material items, capital, information and knowledge across the Empire, adding yet more links to the imperial systems of mobility and exchange.
wartime footing, shortages and rationing of consumer goods, including food, and a depleted housing stock. By the 1940s, their status as mere wives commanded little authority in Britain, where women had played a vital part on the home front during the war. Although Anglo-Indian women saw themselves as knowledgeable and active participants in the British imperial experience
Museum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2013); Mark B. Sandberg, Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums and Modernity (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2003); Nick Prior, Museums and Modernity: Art Galleries and the Making of Modern Culture (Oxford: Berg 2002); Sarah Longair and John McAleer (eds), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2012). j 222 J
and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), and Sarah Longair and John McAleer (eds), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). Botanic gardens, as well as displaying plants and tropical products from colonised regions, often
/4/44. 11 Sarah Longair and John McAleer, ‘Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience’, in Sarah Longair and John McAleer, eds, Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012 ), pp. 1–2. 12 See Christian F. Feest
decolonisation was accomplished without any of the national trauma experienced by France. 1 Indeed, by the time decolonisation had been achieved, Empire was already forgotten, surviving in the national consciousness as little more than a source of nostalgic philately. Imperialism failed to make an impact, the argument continues, because of the diffuse nature of the British imperial experience, and because the