Search results
The book shows how people have come to approach the writing of imperial histories in the early twenty-first century. It explores the social and political contexts that informed the genesis and development of the Studies in Imperialism series, and the conceptual links it has sought to forge between empire and metropolitan culture. The book provides an insightful account of John MacKenzie's 'Orientalism': the problems of 'power' and 'agency'. The 'MacKenziean moment' needs to be read historically, as a product of the 'delayed arrival of decolonising sensibilities', where contemporary popular phenomena and new types of scholarship integrated Britain and its empire. Sexuality made early appearances in the Series through the publication of 'Empire and Sexuality'. MacKenzie's 'Empire of Nature', 'Imperialism and the Natural World', and 'Museums and Empire' convey the impact of his scholarship in the themes of exploration, environment and empire. The historical geographies of British colonialism have enjoyed a prominent place in the Series, and the book explores the ways in which different 'spatial imaginations' have been made possible. Discussions on colonial policing during the depression years, and on immigrant welfare during and after decolonisation, take their cue from MacKenzie's European Empires and the People. The later nineteenth century witnessed the interaction of many diasporas, which in turn produced new modes of communication. By dealing with the idea of the 'Third British Empire' and the role of the Indian press during and after the British Raj, the book repositions British imperial histories within a broader set of global transformations.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book is about the 'colonisation of consciousness'. It examines finance houses, shipping firms, commercial companies, and industrial concerns utilising colonial products existed in each of the European countries. The book offers six case studies, embracing France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, providing evidence for the developments right across (mainly Western) Europe. The exercise of power in each case was, of course, very different, but both were vital to the continuing existence and extension of the imperial project. The book establishes the imperialism involved key articulations of power which operated in multiple directions, directed at indigenous peoples and settlers on the one hand and at members of the domestic population on the other. It demonstrates the inter-war years that saw the stepping up of imperial propaganda throughout the surviving imperial powers.
MacKenzie school’ or ‘MacKenzieites’ rather provocatively, his critique was nevertheless indicative of the stature and respect that John MacKenzie has earned through both the Series and his own impressive, varied and often pioneering scholarship. 2 Yet there is something of an irony in the ascription of such a central position in a ‘school’ of imperial history to a scholar who has often promoted and
virtues linked to imperial spirit and British patriotism. Early authors also uncovered references to sex and gender in music-hall songs, painting and fiction, though occasionally averting their gaze before more sustained examination. John MacKenzie’s Propaganda and Empire (1984) contained little on sex, but that changed with his edited Imperialism and Popular Culture
of the ways exploration and environment converge as objects of scholarly inquiry. Exploration and empire While John MacKenzie and the Studies in Imperialism series have certainly contributed in valuable ways to the renewed attention that historians and other scholars have given to exploration, the environment and empire in recent decades, they have gained purchase as part of a
March Chimes , the Sierra Leone March (1907), By Imperial Command (1920) and Call of the Empire (1939). But his most famous composition was the rousing Imperial Echoes , once the signature tune of Radio Newsreel and the Empire Service of the BBC and still played as the regimental march of the Royal Army Pay Corps. John Mackenzie-Rogan The
Imperialism series, John MacKenzie pioneered a means of bringing empire and Britain, periphery and core, and British and imperial historians, closer together. Rather than thinking of core and periphery as two interacting but discrete spatial containers, each maintaining its own essential identity, he saw that one of these containers was actually constituted by the other. In Propaganda and Empire (1984
the ‘colonial idea in France from 1871 to 1962’. 4 Looking at the composition and impact of the ‘Colonial Party’, 5 historians long argued that the French ‘colonial party’ enjoyed limited popular outreach and failed to turn France into a colonial country. 6 Inspired by the directions of research pioneered by John MacKenzie, specialists of the French Empire started to combine methodologies from
high imperialism witnessed the expansion of consumer markets that focused on products related to the empire. Significant in these developments and in the diffusion of imperial culture, as John MacKenzie argues, was a ‘revolutionary expansion of publishing and popular readership’. 11 One result of this circumstance was a proliferation of ‘hero-publishing’. These texts
The European scramble for colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by rather more than the interests of an elite, aristocratic and bourgeois. This book is about the 'colonisation of consciousness'. It surveys in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book offers six case studies on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, providing parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The book demonstrates the inter-war years that saw the stepping up of imperial propaganda throughout the surviving imperial powers. Inspired by the directions of research pioneered by John MacKenzie, specialists of the French Empire started to combine methodologies from social and cultural history to revise the perception of French popular imperialism. Germany's imperialism is analysed along the axes of mobility and migration, 'race' and the sciences, commodities and markets, the missions and imperialist social formations, and the vast field of popular culture. What sets popular imperialism in Belgium apart from others is the remarkable yet ironic reverence reserved for Leopold II. Power rivalries, ingenious if tricky diplomacy, and Leopold's tenacity resulted in recognition of his rule over much of the Congo around the time of the Berlin conference. So far as the peoples of Europe were concerned, the imperial experience helped, paradoxically, to further 'Eurocentrism' and install the naturalisation of Europeanness as 'whiteness'.