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seamlessly from a fading Pax Britannica to the supposed iron-clad guarantees of a Pax Americana is highly problematic. All of this raises again the problem of studying the dissolution of the British Empire in the era of Vietnam. In his 2002 presidential address to the American Historical Association, Wm. Roger Louis explained that events in Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore were not
Passenger fares on Imperial's single-class services clearly played a role in determining who flew, and how flying served and projected Empire. Imperial Airways kept statistical records fastidiously. Flight incident reports show men out numbering women on Imperial's long-haul flights, but the ratios were not static. British women passengers were generally given only vague identity if they were unmarried. Foreign royalty were among the most celebrated passengers in the publicity Imperial gave to celebrity passengers. The Indian air route had its share of notable passengers. The Vicereine flew back to India on Imperial after four months' home leave in 1933. Professionals with other paid careers also used Imperial Airways to move about. Surgeons, scientists and scholars were among the first converts to commercial air transport. People connected with Imperial Airways and those conducting aviation negotiations or doing airline business also travelled about the Empire by air.
The nineteenth-century Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a steam powered machine. This book provides the first cultural history of technology, authority and the Royal Navy in the years of Pax Britannica. It brings to light the activities, backgrounds, concerns and skills of a group of actors who literally shaped the Royal Navy. The book demonstrates the ways in which naval architects shaped naval thinking about ship design and influenced how ships were employed in active service. The 1830 Whig government's Board of Admiralty abolished the Tory-controlled Navy Board and appointed Symonds to oversee many of its duties and made the self-fashioning of the enlightened 'sailor-designer' identity a priority. The book focuses on the implications of steam for the management of naval architecture. The shaping of the Warrior and the introduction of iron into the British warship took place against the backdrop of projecting naval power and actors building credibility for new materiel. HMS Captain fully represented Cowper Coles's ideas of what a turret ship should be, and her launch the culmination of over ten years' effort, to secure what he considered an ideal trial for demonstrating his design ideas. The Royal Sovereign was one of the Royal Navy's first warships built under the 1889 Naval Defence Act, which provided £21.5 million for ten battleships, thirty-eight cruisers and other smaller vessels. The Navy is one of the most historically significant, and yet singularly neglected, institutions in the history of technology and war.
. The same market economy that ‘frees’ Appiah works to ‘unfree’ non-metropolitan peoples.5 I want to suggest that Achebe’s Home and Exile subtly and powerfully implicates contemporary cosmopolitical thought in the historical violence practised by European colonialism in Africa. Cosmopolitan perspectives, for Achebe, are ultimately present-day expressions of the old ‘Pax Britannica’: the liberal story that Empire likes to tell about itself. That story Achebe began to explode with his 1958 classic novel Things Fall Apart, in which the colonial ‘pacification’ of the
’s rebuilding, from the general plan to the smallest details of sculptural and allegorical work on the facades and interiors. There were certain ironies in this, of course. Baker, in giving architectural expression to the new Bank, was working within an imperial vision drawn from the Pax Britannica, the gold–sterling standard and the unquestioned imperial supremacy of the long nineteenth-century. 62 Between the 1870s and 1914 the Bank had indeed been at the apex of a world system focused on the City as the centre of an
immediate post-war years. Colonial ecological research in Northern Rhodesia contributed to and was structured by a discursive field dominated by the narrative of an impending social and ecological breakdown of ‘native subsistence communities’ triggered by the impact of colonialism: the unintended consequences of Pax Britannica , the introduction of a capitalist economy, and the
associated primarily with sport and with protection against the natural environment of India. British rule in India was, according to the official imperial line, subject to few challenges from the colonized peoples, who supposedly recognized and accepted the civilizing benefits of the Raj and its Pax Britannica . At the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, the complacent Anglo
Morris, Pax Britannica , pp. 267–9. 6 Ibid . 7 Gilmour, The ruling caste , pp. xiii–236. 8 Cook, ‘ The Irish Raj
Jan Morris, Pax Britannica: the climax of an empire (London, 1998 ), p. 263. 10 Wolpert, A new history of India , p. 268. 11 Ibid ., p. 259
: We must now look for the flower of our native army among peoples who have more recently come under our rule, and whom the blessings of the ‘Pax Britannica’ have not yet enervated as well as tranquilised … Nor can we hope that even those races whom we now rely upon to provide us with sturdy warriors can escape the influences to which their predecessors