Search results
they served. The prima facie similarity of subject masked the multiplicity of agendas busily at work in the texts. It has long been recognised that one enterprise for which Livingstone was routinely marshalled was the British Empire. 2 Imperial endeavours were the ever-present subtext of numerous biographies, whose authors re-presented his life, time and again, in order to have
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 07/18/2013, SPi 2 Empire Empire and internationalism interacted in complex and conflicting ways. They bore underlying resemblances in that their practices frequently contradicted their rhetoric about progress and idealism. Similar to internationalism, empires used and created transnational networks; they drew upon expertise that had been gained within the contexts of scientific and cultural exchange, working with missionaries, explorers and scholars. While the unequal power relations at the heart of empire are self
professional institute of architects, but the Dominion Screen implicitly connected architecture to, or rather situated it in, a wider political economy and ecology; a practice contingent on the wealth of the empire, derived from industrial enterprise, beginning with the extraction of its natural resources; and part of a wider visual and material culture which simultaneously fetishised indigenous craft and culture whilst being reliant on processes which erased them. In the South African section of the grid, as an example, one
Navy, nation and empire v 4 v Navy, nation and empire: nineteenth-century photographs of the British naval community overseas Cindy McCreery This volume provides a timely opportunity to reconsider how we define and approach British naval history. Ships and war are of course a fundamental part of this history, but so too are people – civilians as well as officers and sailors. This is particularly true in periods of ‘peace’, such as the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Royal Navy depended on a diverse range of personnel on the spot as much as its
1 The British empire: an enduring fascination At the beginning of the twenty-first century, popular and academic interest in Britain's imperial past remains as strong as ever. Over forty years after Harold Macmillan's 'winds of change' speech, which signalled official recognition that Britain was moving into a post-imperial era of second-class power status, debate still rages among historians about the origins and significance of the empire upon which 'the sun never set'. Reasons for this enduring fascination are not difficult to identify. Uncertainty about the
1 Empire, history and emigration: from Enlightenment to liberalism Karen O’Brien Enlightenment history and the British Empire Enlightenment history in later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain commanded a broad, educated readership among the kinds of social groups who were engaged in the pursuit of empire as colonial landowners, politicians, army officers and East India Company officials.1 The cultural categories and social taxonomies created by these histories permeated the popular novels, memoirs and biographies of the period. These in turn
This book begins from the assumption that race and empire have been central to early modern and modern British history. It addresses the question of how histories written in the past, in different political times, dealt with, considered, or avoided and disavowed Britain's imperial role and issues of difference. The book considers how we might re-think British history in the light of transnational, trans-imperial and cross-cultural analysis, for British history may come to look very different once it is decentered from the national and placed within an imperial and global framework. It, in the contrary, starts from the premise that the denial of racial and ethnic conflicts inside the United Kingdom together with the absence of race as a central category of analysis in historical writing has significantly limited our understanding of British history. In the final part of the book Kathleen Wilson, Antoinette Burton and Geoff Eley all pose fundamental issues about the terrains of contemporary imperial and domestic history writing and the challenges of transnational and trans-imperial work. Wilson uses her eighteenth-century case studies to think about the ways in which mobility across space and time unsettle the idea of the nation as a collective experience. She asks how the English and British overseas contributed to notions of nationality, moving away from the writings of those who thought of themselves as historians to the writings of those who were crafting new notions of national history and identity in their reports and letters from liminal sites of empire.
This book is a study of the colonial officials who governed British Africa between 1900 and the Second World War. Historians have to date failed to provide a detailed examination of what caused these ‘men on the spot’ to think and act in the ways they did. Drawing on a vast range of hitherto underexplored private papers, this book assesses the scope of their different attitudes and endeavours. It considers the role of background, education, training, British culture, social and intellectual networks across Africa, and personal self-interest in shaping the ways that officials related to Africans and to one another, and their ideas of race, empire, governance, development, and duty. It considers the implications of these officials’ mental landscapes for some of the key theories of empire to have emerged in recent years.
4 Metropole, periphery and informal empire: the Gallagher and Robinson controversy of the 1950s and after The Second World War wrought major changes in Britain's position in the world, severely weakening its economy, and confirming the USA as the new dominant global power. But British imperial pretensions died hard, and it was not until the early/mid-1950s that the longevity of the empire began to be brought into question. Nationalist resistance had already done for British rule in India and Burma in the late 1940s, while Arab nationalism first persuaded the
This book considers the impact of colonial and imperial cultures on the landscapes and urban environments of the British Isles from the sixteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century. It asserts that Britain’s 400-year entanglement with global empire left its mark upon the British Isles as much as it did the wider world, and that buildings were among the most powerful and conspicuous manifestations of the myriad relationships that Britain maintained with the theories and practice of colonialism in its modern history. The volume’s content is divided in two main sections: that concerning ‘internal’ colonisation and its infrastructures of control, order, and suppression; and that concerning wider relationships between architecture, the imperial economy, representations of empire, and postcolonial identity. With specifically commissioned new scholarship, the chapters in this volume present for the first time a coherent analysis of the British Isles as an imperial setting understood through its buildings, spaces, and infrastructure.