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also impacted on the urban middle classes. Dilip Hiro, an Indian intellectual, who settled in post-imperial Britain, wrote of how partition had caused his family to leave behind property in Sind (Pakistan) and migrate to the outer suburbs of Bombay, experiencing impoverishment for the first time. Hiro was obliged to take up the burden of supporting a family of six while attending university. 13 Participation
to recognize in it such advantages as would warrant in their eyes the levying of a tax from them. 1 The link between market economies and civilisational uplift is a common refrain in the colonial archive. However, this official did not work for the state, but was an employee of the Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEA). For this employee of the corporation, then, at issue was not simply uncertainty regarding people’s willingness to pay the ‘tax’, but the more
Caribbean migration to Britain brought many new things—new music, new foods, new styles. It brought new ways of thinking too. This book explores the intellectual ideas that the West Indians brought with them to Britain. It shows that, for more than a century, West Indians living in Britain developed a dazzling intellectual critique of the codes of Imperial Britain. Chapters discuss the influence of, amongst others, C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul. The contributors draw from many different disciplines to bring alive the thought and personalities of the figures they discuss, providing a picture of intellectual developments in Britain from which we can still learn much. The introduction argues that the recovery of this Caribbean past, on the home territory of Britain itself, reveals much about the prospects of multiracial Britain.
This book is a study of mobility, image and identity in colonial India and imperial Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a model for studies of migrant figures like K.S. Ranjitsinhji who emerged during the imperial period. Ranjitsinhji is an important figure in the history of modern India and the British empire because he was recognized as a great athlete and described as such. The book focuses on four aspects of Ranjitsinhji's life as a colonial subject: race, money, loyalty and gender. It touches upon Ranjitsinhji's career as a cricketer in the race section. The issue of money gave Indian critics of Ranjitsinhji's regime the language they needed to condemn his personal and administrative priorities, and to portray him as self-indulgent. Ranjitsinhji lived his life as a player of multiple gender roles: sometimes serially, and on occasion simultaneously. His status as a "prince" - while not entirely fake - was fragile enough to be unreliable, and he worked hard to reinforce it even as he constructed his Englishness. Any Indian attempt to transcend race, culture, climate and political place by imitating an English institution and its product must be an unnatural act of insurgency. The disdain for colonial politics that was manifest in the "small rebellions" at the end of the world war converged with the colonized/Indian identity that was evident at the League of Nations. Between the war and his death, it is clear, Ranjitsinhji moved to maximize his autonomy in Nawanagar.
The British community in China was rooted in the diverse cultures of imperial Britain. This book presents a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the book presents a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging people's understanding of British imperialism there. Imperialism is no new subject for scholars of modern Chinese history. The largest settler communities were selfgoverning; even the smallest were still self-replicating. The book focuses on the structure and workings of this establishment in the decades before the Pacific War. The survey presented examines the processes by which Britain in China evolved, how it replicated itself and represented itself (and China). It looks at how it attempted to reform itself in the face of the militant state and mass nationalism it met in China in the mid-1920s and after. The survey also looks at the face of the efforts of the British state to regain control over it and to decolonise the British presence. All Britons in China possessed multiple identities: British, imperial and local. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast.
take pride as a benefit to them and to colonial subjects continued to be available. In a post-1918 climate of anxiety over international affairs, domestic depression and social or political change, ideas of ‘imperial’ Britain or of Britain as the centre of an empire could have a reassuring effect, reinforced by the role played by the ‘white dominions’ on the UK side in the 1914–18 war. In the decade before 1914, history books cited dominion support for the British against the Boers in the 1899–1901 war in South Africa as evidence of the bonds linking Britain to
Rebellato shifts the focus to the post-war drama scene, interrogating the conventional view of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger as a dividing line between a pre- and post-imperial British theatre. He presents a more complex picture of a British theatre torn ambivalently between alternative political readings of the meaning of imperial decline. Earlier playwrights like Coward, Priestly and Rattigan were
and identity in colonial India and imperial Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is not a biography of Ranjitsinhji. Several functional biographies already exist. The most significant is Roland Wild’s authorized biography, published soon after Ranjitsinhji’s death. 1 Like much of the early writing on Ranjitsinhji, Wild’s book is frankly hagiographie. As an authorized narrative, it approaches autobiography, and is thus marked by the unreliability as well as the privileged content that
imperial identity: how to be imperial, and how to reconcile different versions of the imperial project, were, as we have argued, integral to the discourse on imperial cities. Part III addresses the issue of imperial identities directly. In Chapter 12, John MacKenzie considers the cultural history of Glasgow, once renowned as the ‘second city’ of the empire, examining the complex interplay of imperial, British, Scottish and civic identities. What is striking about this case is the divergence between the evidently imperial image of
inconsistency and superficiality and the patent absurdity of claiming that Italy was at all in the same league as Imperial Britain. Lewis stressed that Britain, or more specifically England, was the birthplace of the modern industrial world. It had the largest empire, the largest merchant marine, the most powerful navy, especially after the launch of the revolutionary big-gun turbine-driven battleship HMS Dreadnought Adamowicz and Storchi, Back to the Furutists.indd 159 01/11/2013 10:58:46 160 Jonathan Black in 1906 (Blom 2009: 163). Britain had a much greater