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In the late Victorian period journalism was to imperialism as the tick bird is to the rhino. Everywhere that British armies went they bore on their backs correspondents like G. W. Steevens, illustrators like Melton Prior, and professional self-promoters like the young Winston Churchill. Every colonial war was almost instantly replayed for the audience in Britain and
chapter2 21/12/04 11:09 am Page 39 2 Gendering imperialism: Anne McClintock and H. Rider Haggard Gayatri Spivak’s work on nineteenth-century imperialist literature directs feminist analysis to the narrative dynamics of human reproduction and production.1 She examines the codification of women as racial reproducers, and its relation to the conception of women as imperial producers of human subjectivity itself. Exciting though this direction is, feminist critics also need to further explore how economic production directly informs, and generates, literary
sexuality politics and more generally of imperialism from a different angle. I suggest that regulation travelled poorly to Africa, in part because it was impeded by colonial environments, as seen and experienced by those who inhabited and governed them. Exploring an illuminating if not, of course, generally representative component of the ‘unregulated Empire’ – colonies that proved resistant to CD laws – the chapter traces the deliberations on the possibility of introducing CD laws on the part of key figures in Sierra Leone
emigration within the Empire was a common one in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. It also illustrates the intertwined notions of imperialism and citizenship. Emigration was a case of imperial citizenship at work, or, as the social worker and emigration advocate Thomas Sedgwick put it, ‘Practical Imperialism.’ 2 As we have seen, the creation of a true imperial citizenship was
Gender history is more than the recovery of women's pasts and inclusion of female experiences into history. This book brings together two traditionally separate areas of historical literature: writings on women and gender on the one hand, and scholarship on British imperialism and colonialism on the other. It marks an important new intervention into a vibrant area of scholarship, creating a dialogue between the histories of imperialism and of women and gender. By engaging critically with both traditional British imperial history and colonial discourse analysis, the book demonstrates how feminist historians can play a central role in creating new histories of British imperialism. The first part of the book offers new perspectives on the nature of British imperial power through exploring the gender dimensions of the imposition of British control. It discusses study of the age of consent, body of scholarship, and British women missionaries in India. The second part talks about the gender dimensions of a spectrum of reactions to British imperialism. The focus is on colonising women and the colonized women. The third part switches from colonial contexts to explore the impact of imperialism within Britain itself. It presents both the anti-slavery discourse constructed by women anti-slavery campaigners and the 'triple discourse' of anti-slavery in early feminist tracts of 1790 to 1869 as marking key roots of the 'imperial feminism'. Finally, the inter-war period is explored focusing on the under-researched area of white women's involvement in imperial politics and race issues.
Music played a major role in the life of a global ideological phenomenon like the British Empire. This book demonstrates that music has to be recognised as one of the central characteristics of the cultural imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It begins with an account of the imperial music of Sir Edward Elgar and Sir Arthur Sullivan and the establishing of an imperial musical idiom. The book discusses the music composed for or utilized by official occasions: coronations, jubilees, exhibitions, tattoos, Armistice Day and Empire Day. Community singing was also introduced at the Aldershot Military Tattoo in 1927, sponsored by the Daily Express. The book examines the imperial content of a range of musical forms: operetta and ballet, films, music hall songs, ballads, hymns and marches. In one of the scenes depicting ballet, Indian dancing girls are ordered to reveal the riches of the land and the Ballet of Jewels. There were two staples of song in the second half of the nineteenth century: the drawing-room ballad and the music-hall song. Sir Henry Coward was Britain's leading chorus-master, and his 1911 musical world tour with Sheffield choir was the high point of his career. The book concludes with a discussion of practitioners of imperial music: the divas Emma Albani, Nellie Melba and Clara Butt, and the baritone Peter Dawson.
Popular culture is invariably a vehicle for the dominant ideas of its age. Never was this more true than in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, when it reflected the nationalist and imperialist ideologies current throughout Europe. This book examines the various media through which nationalist ideas were conveyed in late-Victorian and Edwardian times in the theatre, "ethnic" shows, juvenile literature, education and the iconography of popular art. Nineteenth-century music hall was known as the 'fount of patriotism'. A heroic and romantic vision of Empire helped to widen the appeal of British imperialism, which newspaper and magazine editors insisted on communicating to the new mass reading public. Juvenile fiction included Victorian children's books, and very few seemed deliberately anti-imperialist. The book offers a bridge between the pre-1914 period and the interwar years and between the public school and state school systems. It discusses the case of Peter Lobengula as a focus for racial attributes in late Victorian and Edwardian times. The imperial economic vision lay ready to hand for the publicists and public relations men who saw the Empire Marketing Board as one of the great opportunities in the inter-war years to develop their craft. The book also argues that whereas the Scout movement was created in the atmosphere of defensive Empire in the Edwardian period, Scouting ideology underwent a significant change in the post-war years. Girl Guides remind us that the role of girls and women in youth organisations and imperial ideologies has been too little studied.
4 Against imperialism and war Wilkinson’s anti-imperialism involved domestic campaigning, attendance at international conferences, travel to the sites of colonial repression and a network of anti-colonial activist acquaintances. Until 1939, Wilkinson linked war and imperialism, participating in both antiwar and anti-imperialist campaigns. Her work within the movements was not easily compartmentalised, sometimes occurring through the vehicle of the women’s or the Labour movement. Movements merged, separated out, transcended their old boundaries, each with their
9 Drury Lane imperialism Jeffrey Richards W hen it was published in 2004, Bernard Porter’s The Absent-Minded Imperialists created quite a stir. In spite of the weight of evidence to the contrary which has been built up since John MacKenzie published his pioneering studies Propaganda and Empire (1984) and Imperialism and Popular Culture (1986), in the Manchester University Press ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series (which now exceeds 100 volumes) and in the work of a myriad of other scholars, he insisted that the working classes in Britain were ignorant of
The search for an improving juvenile literature demonstrates perhaps better than any other field the manner in which the core ideology of imperialism solved the many problems which had been identified during the nineteenth century. Anxieties about the extension of literacy and the provision of a distinctively juvenile literature, both in books and in periodicals, were resolved by the