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Shortly after the Prince of Wales’ 1875–76 visit to India, Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India, wrote to Queen Victoria complaining that, hitherto, British rule had relied too heavily on ‘costly canals and irrigation works which have greatly embarrassed our finances, and are as yet so little appreciated by the Hindoo rustic that they do not pay the expense of making them’. 1
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'.
Movement of 1930–3. Although this reliance upon police power was not without its hazards for the British administration, especially the outcry against ‘police excesses’ and the condemnation of British rule as a ‘police raj’, it was thought preferable to the bloodier forms of military intervention which had led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in April 1919, when nearly 400 people were killed
Cyprus' importance was always more imagined than real and was enmeshed within widely held cultural signifiers and myths. This book explores the tensions underlying British imperialism in Cyprus. It presents a study that follows Cyprus' progress from a perceived imperial asset to an expendable backwater. The book explains how the Union Jack came to fly over the island and why after thirty-five years the British wanted it lowered. It fills a gap in the existing literature on the early British period in Cyprus and challenges the received and monolithic view that British imperial policy was based primarily or exclusively on strategic-military considerations. The book traces the links between England/Britain and Cyprus since Richard Coeur de Lion and situates these links within a tradition of Romantic adventure, strategic advantage, spiritual imperialism and a sense of possession. The British wanted to revitalise western Asia by establishing informal control over it through the establishment of Cyprus as a place d'armes. Because the British did not find Cyprus an 'Eldorado' of boundless wealth, they did not invest the energy or funds to 'renew' it. British economic policy in Cyprus was contradictory; it rendered Cyprus economically unviable. Hellenic nationalism, propelled by the failure of British social and economic policies, upturned the multicultural system and challenged the viability of British rule. Situating Cyprus within British imperial strategy shows that the island was useless and a liability.
consequences of patronage had an acute effect on the policy choices of the Free State government. Memories of the long-term implications of a disreputable political system were the underlying motivation of the governments and civil servants of the early 1920s to prevent the perception of history repeating itself. 20 Political corruption in Ireland, 1922–2010 Administrative legacies of British rule: conditions for Irish probity The appointment of Augustine Birrell as Chief Secretary to Ireland from 1907 to 1916, had two profound effects on the character of post
Islam (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882 ); (b) the pamphlet, Atrocities of British Justice under British Rule in Egypt (London: T.F. Unwin, 1906 ); and (c) Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (London: Knopf, 1907 ). 42 Kabbani, Imperial Fictions , p. 32
Through the 1950s, Wright authored three books which engaged with the collapse of the European colonial order, and they instantly became part of the larger history that they were describing, such that we can view them now as classic texts of decolonisation. Black Power , published in 1954, told of Nkrumah’s Gold Coast (soon to be Ghana) in the dying days of British rule. The
not until mid-1916 that the island started to play a strategic role. This was the first time it had done so after the British occupation in 1878, even though the island had been occupied for strategic reasons. 3 This chapter has two aims: first to explore the development of Cypriot society from its late Ottoman period and the first decades of British rule in order to understand the conditions that
book on British colonies in Africa. It is fine. What an indictment!’ 22 As Padmore explained to an agent Cunard recommended, the idea for How Britain Rules Africa came in response to a British Labour Party resolution promising colonial reforms when it came to power. ‘So in order to arouse public opinion in Britain on behalf of the African peoples, my countrymen asked me to
had a great deal to do with the changed position of Britain after the Second World War, both in the region itself and in relation to Britain's wider geopolitical standing. 1 When in 1939 Britain took the ‘jewel’ in their imperial ‘crown’ into the war without first consulting Indians, the leading nationalist organisation – the Indian National Congress – opposed it; widespread nationalist protests ensued, culminating in the 1942 Quit India movement, a mass movement against British rule. For their opposition, key