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Changing approaches to hunting constitute an important theme in human history. This book uses hunting as one focus for the complex interaction of Europeans with Africans and Indians. It seeks to illuminate the nature of imperial power when exercised in the relationship between humans and the natural world. The main geographical emphasis is on southern, Central and East Africa, as well as South Asia, but reference is made to other parts of Africa and Asia and to the effects of white settlement elsewhere. The great hunters of the ancient world offered protection to their subjects' life and limb and to their crops by destroying wild predators. In Britain the nineteenth-century hunting cult had an extraordinary range of cultural manifestations. Pheasant covert, grouse moor and deer forest, explored and dominated by humans in the Hunt, became prime elements in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Hunting was an important part of the pre-colonial economy and diet of many African peoples. The importance of hunting was very apparent at the court of Mzilikazi, king of the Ndebele. As the animal resources of southern Africa became more important to the international economy in the first decades of the nineteenth century they came to be studied and hunted for science and sport. This apotheosis of the hunting mentality survived at least into the inter-war years and was indeed inherited by the Indianised Indian Civil Service and army in the years leading up to independence. Hunting remains important to those who continue to exercise global power.
Museums were an expression of the western conviction in the onward march of the rational. Local civilisations were also the prime focus in other Asian imperial museums. This is the first book that examines the origins and development of museums in six major regions if the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyses museum histories in thirteen major centres in Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and South-East Asia, setting them into the economic and social contexts of the cities and colonies in which they were located. Museums in Canada have a longer, though somewhat chequered, history than elsewhere in the British Empire. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto and the Royal British Columbia museum in Victoria were two notable, yet very different, expressions of imperial expansiveness . The book then overviews two representative museums: the South African Museum (SAM) in Cape Town and the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. The origins and development of the National Museum of Victoria (NMV) in Melbourne, South Australian Museum (SAuM) and Australian Museum (AM) are then discussed. New Zealand/Aotearoa, with its Canterbury Museum and War Memorial Museum, has discrete origins as a colony in the nineteenth century. Imperial museums in Asia were unquestionably distinctive compared with those of the territories of white settlement. A number of key themes emerge: the development of elites within colonial towns; the emergence of the full range of cultural institutions associated with this; and the modification of the key scientific ideas of the age.
On the global stage the British diaspora, proportionate to its population, remains one of the largest. This book is the first social history to explore experiences of British emigrants from the peak years of the 1960s to the emigration resurgence of the turn of the twentieth century. It explores migrant experiences in Australia, Canada and New Zealand alongside other countries. The book charts the gradual reinvention of the 'British diaspora' from a postwar migration of austerity to a modern migration of prosperity. It is divided into two parts. First part presents a decade-by-decade chronology of changes in migration patterns and experience, progressing gradually from the postwar migration of austerity to a more discretionary mobility of affluence. It discusses 'pioneers of modern mobility'; the 1970s rise in non-white migration and the decline of British privilege in the old Commonwealth countries of white settlement; 'Thatcher's refugees' and cosmopolitanism and 'lifestyle' migration. Second part shifts from a chronological to a thematic focus, by drilling down into some of the more prominent themes encountered. It explores the interplay of patterns of change and continuity in the migrant careers of skilled workers, trade unionists, professionals and mobile academics. The push and pull of private life, migration to transform a way of life, and migrant and return experiences discussed highlight the underlying theme of continuity amidst change. The long process of change from the 1960s to patterns of discretionary, treechange and nomadic migration became more common practice from the end of the twentieth century.
of white settlement in their [real and imagined] relations with Africans, state officials, and one another. The souls of white folk Within the souls of white settlers, I argue, we find a series of interlacing ideas. White settlement was based on the equation of civilization with [a difficult to define] whiteness; was emotionally enriched through notions of paternalism and
the two most significant territories of the Portuguese empire, both politically and economically, they also became areas of white settlement. This last characteristic held strong sway in the development model that the regime devised for those colonies. Although this text will give priority to the perspectives and strategies of the Portuguese state, it will also reflect on the
back as the juggernaut advances. In many ways, the settlement of Central Queensland seems to epitomise this model. Identified in the mid-1840s as offering excellent prospects for depasturing stock, it was taken up over a period of fifteen years by settlers from the south and east. White settlement was accompanied by a high level of interracial violence but seemingly quickly replaced by all the
of responsible government. Others should be governed at the local level by leaders possessing the authority conferred by tradition, subject to the guidance of British advisers and a single metropolitan authority for the conduct of defence and foreign relations. Beyond the colonies of white settlement the implementation of the new model was closely associated with the great imperial ‘proconsuls
Imperial museums in Asia were unquestionably distinctive compared with those of the territories of white settlement. Despite similarities in foundation, cultural and historical, social and economic differences produced contrasting characteristics. In the first place, western-style Asian museums developed out of the foundation of the Asiatic(k) Society of Bengal in Calcutta
This chapter explores the impact British colonialism had on the Caribbean environment. It argues that both the model of intensive plantation agriculture and the haphazard urban settlements that came to characterise British Caribbean society rendered the islands more vulnerable to the acute hazards considered in this book. It shows that these vulnerabilities, deforestation, the lack of self-sufficiency and the fragile inadequate construction of most Caribbean property, to name just a few, are not only something historians can observe with hindsight, but were readily raised by those who visited and lived in the Caribbean. Consequently, this chapter explores why these apparent vulnerabilities were never addressed and the societies engineered with so little resilience. It argues that, broadly speaking, because the British never saw the region as a place for permanent, developed white settlement they never deemed it worthwhile to invest the time, effort and capital there to build resilience.
What do we really know of the origins and first spread of major monotheistic religions, once we strip away the myths and later traditions that developed? Creating God uses modern critical historical scholarship alongside archaeology to describe the times and places which saw the emergence of Mormonism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism. What was the social, economic and political world in which they began, and the framework of other contemporary religious movements in which they could flourish? What was their historical background and what was their geographical setting? Written from a secular viewpoint, the author reveals where a scholarly approach to the history of religions may diverge from the assumptions of faith, and shows the value of comparing different movements and different histories in one account. Throughout history, many individuals have believed that they were in direct contact with a divine source, receiving direction to spread a religious message. A few persuaded others and developed a following, and a small minority of such movements grew into full religions. In time, these movements developed, augmented, selected and invented their own narratives of foundation: stories about the founders’ lives and the early stages in which their religious group emerged. Modern critical scholarship helps us understand something of how a successful religion could emerge, thrive and begin the journey to become a world faith. This book presents a narrative to interest, challenge and intrigue readers interested in the beginnings of some of the most powerful ideas that have influenced human history.