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This book examines the place of Hong Kong in the British imagination between the end of World War II and the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in July 1997. It argues that Hong Kong has received far less attention from British imperial and cultural historians than its importance would warrant. It argues that Hong Kong was a site within which competing yet complementary visions of Britishness could be imagined—for example, the British penchant for trade and good government, and their role as agents of modernization. At the centre of these articulations of Britishness was the idea of Hong Kong as a “barren rock” that British administration had transformed into one of the world’s great cities—and the danger of its destruction by the impending “handover” to communist China in 1997.
The book moves freely between the activities of Britons in Hong Kong and portrayals of Hong Kong within domestic British discourse. It uses such printed primary sources as newspapers, memoirs, novels, political pamphlets, and academic texts, and archival material located in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia, including government documents, regimental collections, and personal papers.
significant in that it interprets his speech in terms of a wider imperial outlook. In conjuring up this image of a disreputable ‘pirate Empire’, Morley can be seen to have drawn on the long-recognized pro-Boer critique of the crisis as the result of British aggression. However, Morley was also touching on the wider anxieties over questions of imperial governance, particularly concerns over ‘true
tended to generate jealousy of, or superiority towards, other colonies. 1 Each colonial corps was also fragmented internally. In an environment powered by gossip and officials’ sense of themselves, divergent attitudes towards imperial governance fostered envy or condescension as to the administrative procedures, opportunities and working conditions of others in their colony. This points to the
experience of empire-building, was their imprecision. This encouraged officials to develop their own ideas as to what constituted normative modes of imperial governance. Chapter Three will consider the ways that officials interacted with one another. Colonial elites were unable to establish the esprit de corps usually deemed a central feature of British colonial life in Africa. Officials rarely considered
introducing the ‘habit of obeying’ law and order to ‘savage and semi-savage populations’ across the territory. 47 While he qualified his statements by reassuring the colonial premiers of the notable successes his governance had brought about in this vein, MacGregor's statements did not give the Australian colonial leaders what they wished to hear. Australian colonial leaders’ attitudes towards New Guinea soured because of the disappointing results of humanitarian imperial governance
young. Nonetheless, the quest to enact nutritional improvement ultimately remained confined to voluntary schemes rather than state action. This scenario, as this chapter demonstrates, allowed 156 ሉ Food, imperialism and resistance, c.1900–22 ሊ nationalist opponents to British rule to ask whether imperial governance was in fact helping to determine the conditions that had caused Irish national decline rather than helping to remove them, a theme that forms the basis of Part III of this monograph. Infant welfare During the late nineteenth century, the individualistic
The long period of Queen Victoria’s reign witnessed a range of transitions in conceptions of colonial diplomacy and imperial governance. Gifts exchanged between Aboriginal people and the sovereign or her representatives indicate a great deal about those transitions, as well as about Aboriginal people’s capacity to assert cultural autonomy even as they expressed loyalty to the Crown. This paper compares some of the different contexts in nineteenth-century Canada and Australia where Aboriginal people figured as recipients of the Queen’s gifts, particularly in commemorative moments that celebrated the ideals of Empire and British sovereignty. In considering how these gifts were received and how they circulated, it explores some of the different meanings these gifts might have held, and the potentially unsettled relationships they implied between Aboriginal people and the British Crown.
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
this book Aboriginal voices have been almost entirely refracted through scientific sources. As the nuanced scholarship of Pratik Chakrabarti suggests, non-Eurocentric perspectives can constructively rescript the historiographies of tropical medicine, dangerous beasts and Imperial governance. 6 An entirely different history of Indigenous ways of knowing and responding to venomous animals, both pre- and
, construction of policy and the contingencies of imperial governance. States do not always come to decisions logically or through evidence-based reasoning; decisions are often wrong; reasons for bad decisions can be twisted and turned to justify them differently; and there is a great reluctance to admit a wrong move, let alone to reverse it. Imperialism is especially difficult to reverse. Positive vibes and