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The first British Methodist missionaries came to Upper Burma in 1887 and the last left in 1966. They were known as 'Wesleyans' before 1932 and afterwards as 'Methodists'. This book is a study of the ambitions, activities and achievements of Methodist missionaries in northern Burma from 1887-1966 and the expulsion of the last missionaries by Ne Win. Henry Venn, the impeccably evangelical Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), was the most distinguished and inspiring of nineteenth-century mission administrators. Wesleyan missionaries often found property development more congenial than saving souls. In Pakokku in December 1905, a 'weak' American missionary from Myingyan and a couple of Baptist Burman government officials began 'totally immersing' Wesleyans. Proselytism was officially frowned upon in the Indian Empire. The Wesley high schools were extraordinarily successful during the early years of the twentieth century. The Colonial Government was investing heavily in education. A bamboo curtain descended on Upper Burma in May 1942. Wesley Church Mandalay was gutted during the bombing raids of April 1942 and the Japanese requisitioned the Mission House and the Girls High School soon afterwards. General Ne Win was ruthlessly radical in 1962. By April 1964 Bishop was the last 'front-line' Methodist missionary in Upper Burma and the last European of any sort in Monywa. The book pulls together the themes of conflict, politics and proselytisation in to a fascinating study of great breadth.
Seventeenth-century England saw the Puritan upheaval of the 1640s and 1650s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These crises often provoked colonial reaction, indirectly by bringing forth new ideas about government. The colonies' existence was a testament to accumulated capital and population and to a widespread desire to employ both for high and mundane ends. The growth of population and production, the rise of new and the decline of old trades were important features of 17th-century American and English history. This book presents a study that brings attention back to a century when the word imperialism had not even been coined, let alone acquired the wealth of meanings it has now. The study covers the North American and West Indian colonies as well as England. Research on American sources concentrated on the main settlements of Massachusetts, Virginia, Barbados and Jamaica, their public records, printed and manuscript correspondence and local and county records. Lesser colonies such as New York, Carolina and the New England fringe settlements they have their own stories to tell. The study firstly rests on the proposition that England's empire was shaped by the course of English politics. Secondly, it argues that although imperial history was marked by tension between colonial resistance and English authority. Finally, the broad view is taken of the politics of empire aims to establish a general framework for understanding seventeenth-century colonial history. Attention has also been paid to the political writings and the "non-colonial" activities of governments and politicians.
Hong Kong occupies a famously unusual place within the British decolonisation narrative. As John Darwin noted in an essay published at the time of the handover to China in 1997, Hong Kong lacked a substantial indigenous nationalist movement clamouring for Britain’s exodus, and nor did the colonial government suffer a breakdown in collaboration with local elites. Independence was never a plausible goal for the territory, and accordingly, following Governor Mark Young’s aborted efforts to introduce democratic constitutional reforms in 1946, the colonial
just been imposed by the colonial government but had been negotiated with and implemented by, principally, leaders of the native born. Gibraltar for Gibraltarians signalled a distinctive and civilian identity. Moreover, the economic dependence of civilians on British garrison expenditure, although for a very long time not absolute, had been further reduced, in part as a result of government-led initiatives to diversify the economy, in part by the ambitions of civilian entrepreneurs and in part with the beginning of the rundown in the British military presence
reform the nation of Puerto Rico itself, and trained nursing was one way they sought to enact those reforms. Lest the nurses seem like unwitting tools, I argue that these nurses agreed that Puerto Rico needed their help and they were complicit in the colonial agenda. The Puerto Rico colonial government’s annual reports to the Department of War and mission reports reveal a strong connection between the missionary evangelical aims and the US government colonial goals for Puerto Rico. Both groups believed in the power of nursing training to ‘improve’ Puerto Rican society
follows is an attempt, first, to examine legal and institutional structures created by British colonization in relation to water, 4 a key resource in social production, and the contradictions it created in society both for the colonial Government and the population in the Krishna River Basin in the Deccan Peninsula of southern India. The Krishna Basin is the second largest river
colonial rule – stepped in to provide (limited) access for their members to welfare services, health care and forms of insurance. Humanitarianism was never purely the prerogative of the colonial government. West Africans in the British Empire defined their own humanitarian priorities, even when they had little in the way of resources, by mobilising the language of anti-slave trading and relying on their own civil society
the forms and channels of English and American influence on Canadian ideas about social and moral reform’. 8 In Australia, similarly, much of the content of social purity movements could be traced to English and American sources. Regulation Bills, put before and sometimes passed by responsible colonial governments, were generally modelled directly or indirectly on their English counterparts. English campaign strategies were also transplanted and adopted, as the preceding discussions of Dyer and Malabari have made clear. The
, a symbiotic alliance developed between the colonial government and a religious group on the margins of Surinamese society, the Catholics. Much of the historiography of Batavia has concentrated on the role of the Roman Catholic Church, which took charge of the care of the sufferers. Writers have emphasized the Church’s humanitarian and religious motivations, and extolled the dedication and self-sacrifice of the priests working and living in Batavia.1 This praise is certainly justified, but there were other dimensions to life in the asylum. For the Catholics
: ideas to extend banking facilities for indigenous populations, better support for local business and agriculture, and an increase in the availability of medium and long-term finance for business, the extension of co-operative farming methods, changes to education policy in Britain’s African colonies, the creation of a permanent economic staff in colonial governments, and the