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attempts to weld 'its disparate population into a specifically civic and imperial identity'. 3 Other studies have downplayed the uniqueness of London and Glasgow and stressed that major British cities operated within an 'imperial system'. Sheryllyne Haggerty and others have argued that Liverpool's imperial past was not exceptional but was part of an urban network 'working both commercially and
This book explores the influence of imperialism in the landscapes of modern European cities including London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Marseilles, Glasgow and Seville. The first part considers some ways in which the design of urban landscapes articulated competing visions of the imperial city, including large-scale planning and architectural schemes, urban design and public monuments. The final shape of the Queen Victoria Memorial in London suggests an oddly tenuous relationship between the creation of imperial space and the representation of the empire itself. The notions of empire and romanità are expressed through the location, styling and form of the Vittoriano in Rome. The second part of the book considers the role of various forms of visual display, including spectacular pageants, imperial exhibitions and suburban gardens, in the cultural life of metropolitan imperialism. The material transformation of Paris with rhetorical devices reveals a deep-seated ambiguity about just how 'imperial' Paris wanted to appear. Sydenham Crystal Palace housed the Ethnological and Natural History Department, and its displays brought together animals, plants and human figures from various areas of the globe. The largest part of imperial Vienna's tourist traffic came from within the Austrian lands of the empire. The last part of the book is primarily concerned with the associations between imperial identities and the history of urban space in a variety of European cities. The book considers the changing cultural and political identities in the imperial city, looking particularly at nationalism, masculinity and anti-imperialism.
its multiple and contradictory representations of British imperial identity. 10 Curzon insisted on distinct boundaries between Indian and British cultural identities. 11 However, the extensive catalogue text by George Watt, exhibition curator, interjected inconsistencies that revealed permeable boundaries and undermined Curzon’s purist cultural partitions, giving the exhibition multiple ‘webs of
LIVERPOOL PETITIONS AND IMPERIAL IDENTITY 10 Slaves, sati and sugar: constructing imperial identity through Liverpool petition struggles Joshua Civin In 1833, the Liverpool Times reported: ‘The most illustrious of the Dicky Sams, the Magnates of the Town Hall and of the ’Change, have been dancing attendance on still greater men from the opening of the Session.’ Lobbying was not restricted to ‘Liverpool grandees’. In addition, ‘a host of tar jackets and freemen’ testified before parliamentary committees.1 This intensive lobbying shows the lengths to which
This book has constructed an alternative narrative of empire from the local margins and assessed the centrality of imperial identity to those living in urban communities between 1870 and 1939. 1 With the city as the centre piece of analysis, the book has sought to transcend national narratives of imperialism that have characterised the historiography of popular culture
construction of a modern British imperial identity as seen in the 1903 durbar exhibition of Indian art. Codell uses Clifford Geertz’s idea of the exhibition of Indian art as a ‘thick’ cultural experience to explore its multiple and contradictory representations of British imperial identity within the framework of gentlemanly capitalism. 13 The extensive catalogue of the durbar exhibition revealed permeable margins that undermined
past identities, a city could sustain a series of historical identities, or ‘historical sequences’, only in adjacent spaces: ‘the same space cannot have two different [historical] contents’. 2 In this chapter we suggest otherwise. Our focus is on various attempts by successive Italian governments from 1870 until 1911 to articulate the imperial identities of antiquity together with the contemporary imperial pretensions of the modern Italian kingdom in the reworked landscapes of central Rome. We argue that the making of modern
Catholicism’s image as a consolidated and global church with common methods of worship, clerical structures and parish or mission organisation, new research is showing that factors such as culture, ethnicity, language and gender complicate this picture.3 Mass emigration from Ireland during the nineteenth century introduced a new dimension to Britain’s imperial identity and facilitated the establishment and formation of new Catholic communities that would help to cement Britain’s authority as a governing power.4 The organisational and support networks that they established
its dissemination both in Britain and Zanzibar through exhibitions and printed texts – is the subject of this chapter. It reveals how these displays of material culture and the interpretative narratives associated with them offer new insights into the construction of Zanzibar’s imperial identity at home and abroad in the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter will examine the nature of this
analysis of the ‘metropole’ to include more than just London. They both discuss imperialism as present in smaller, provincial towns, although they focus on the larger cities of Birmingham and Glasgow respectively. Hall, in Civilising Subjects , offers an analysis of Birmingham, which brilliantly tackles the complexities of imperial identities in the self-proclaimed ‘midland metropolis’. 6