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      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Guardians of Empire

        The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers, C.1700-1964

        by Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie, David Killingray

        For imperialists, the concept of guardian is specifically to the armed forces that kept watch on the frontiers and in the heartlands of imperial territories. Large parts of Asia and Africa, and the islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean were imperial possessions. This book discusses how military requirements and North Indian military culture, shaped the cantonments and considers the problems posed by venereal diseases and alcohol, and the sanitary strategies pursued to combat them. The trans-border Pathan tribes remained an insistent problem in Indian defence between 1849 and 1947. The book examines the process by which the Dutch elite recruited military allies, and the contribution of Indonesian soldiers to the actual fighting. The idea of naval guardianship as expressed in the campaign against the South Pacific labour trade is examined. The book reveals the extent of military influence of the Schutztruppen on the political developments in the German protectorates in German South-West Africa and German East Africa. The U.S. Army, charged with defending the Pacific possessions of the Philippines and Hawaii, encountered a predicament similar to that of the mythological Cerberus. The regimentation of military families linked access to women with reliable service, and enabled the King's African Rifles to inspire a high level of discipline in its African soldiers, askaris. The book explains the political and military pressures which drove successive French governments to widen the scope of French military operations in Algeria between 1954 and 1958. It also explores gender issues and African colonial armies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Popular imperialism and the military, 1850-1950

        by John M. MacKenzie

        Colonial war played a vital part in transforming the reputation of the military and placing it on a standing equal to that of the navy. The book is concerned with the interactive culture of colonial warfare, with the representation of the military in popular media at home, and how these images affected attitudes towards war itself and wider intellectual and institutional forces. It sets out to relate the changing image of the military to these fundamental facts. For the dominant people they were an atavistic form of war, shorn of guilt by Social Darwinian and racial ideas, and rendered less dangerous by the increasing technological gap between Europe and the world. Attempts to justify and understand war were naturally important to dominant people, for the extension of imperial power was seldom a peaceful process. The entertainment value of war in the British imperial experience does seem to have taken new and more intensive forms from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. Themes such as the delusive seduction of martial music, the sketch of the music hall song, powerful mythic texts of popular imperialism, and heroic myths of empire are discussed extensively. The first important British war correspondent was William Howard Russell (1820-1907) of The Times, in the Crimea. The 1870s saw a dramatic change in the representation of the officer in British battle painting. Up to that point it was the officer's courage, tactical wisdom and social prestige that were put on display.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        July 2025

        Conquest and resistance in West Africa

        The Jeandet Affair and the illusion of colonial justice

        by Ruth Ginio

        This book is an enthralling account of a legal scandal, which erupted in colonial Senegal in 1890 and reached the French metropolitan press and the parliament. The murder of a colonial administrator, Abel Jeandet, by one of his soldiers led to the brutal and illegal executions without trial of the killer and two local dignitaries. The volume follows the fascinating story of Ndiereby Ba, the widow of one of the dignitaries, who with the help of powerful métis men in the capital Saint Louis sued the French administrators who had supervised the executions for the murder of her husband. Through this captivating tale the book articulates the French expansion into West Africa, the resistance to colonial rule both violent and non-violent, and the lack of interest on the part of French politicians in the brutal conquest of a territory they know nothing about.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Rethinking settler colonialism

        History and memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa

        by Annie Coombes

        Rethinking settler colonialism focuses on the long history of contact between indigenous peoples and the white colonial communities who settled in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. It interrogates how histories of colonial settlement have been mythologised, narrated and embodied in public culture in the twentieth century (through monuments, exhibitions and images) and charts some of the vociferous challenges to such histories that have emerged over recent years. Despite a shared familiarity with cultural and political institutions, practices and policies amongst the white settler communities, the distinctiveness which marked these constituencies as variously, 'Australian', 'South African', 'Canadian' or 'New Zealander', was fundamentally contingent upon their relationship to and with the various indigenous communities they encountered. In each of these countries these communities were displaced, marginalised and sometimes subjected to attempted genocide through the colonial process. Recently these groups have renewed their claims for greater political representation and autonomy. The essays and artwork in this book insist that an understanding of the political and cultural institutions and practices which shaped settler-colonial societies in the past can provide important insights into how this legacy of unequal rights can be contested in the present. It will be of interest to those studying the effects of colonial powers on indigenous populations, and the legacies of imperial rule in postcolonial societies.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2022

        The violence of colonial photography

        by Daniel Foliard

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Imperialism and the natural world

        by John M. MacKenzie

        Imperial power, both formal and informal, and research in the natural sciences were closely dependent in the nineteenth century. This book examines a portion of the mass-produced juvenile literature, focusing on the cluster of ideas connected with Britain's role in the maintenance of order and the spread of civilization. It discusses the political economy of Western ecological systems, and the consequences of their extension to the colonial periphery, particularly in forms of forest conservation. Progress and consumerism were major constituents of the consensus that helped stabilise the late Victorian society, but consumerism only works if it can deliver the goods. From 1842 onwards, almost all major episodes of coordinated popular resistance to colonial rule in India were preceded by phases of vigorous resistance to colonial forest control. By the late 1840s, a limited number of professional positions were available for geologists in British imperial service, but imperial geology had a longer pedigree. Modern imperialism or 'municipal imperialism' offers a broader framework for understanding the origins, long duration and persistent support for overseas expansion which transcended the rise and fall of cabinets or international realignments in the 1800s. Although medical scientists began to discern and control the microbiological causes of tropical ills after the mid-nineteenth century, the claims for climatic causation did not undergo a corresponding decline. Arthur Pearson's Pearson's Magazine was patriotic, militaristic and devoted to royalty. The book explores how science emerged as an important feature of the development policies of the Colonial Office (CO) of the colonial empire.

      • Trusted Partner
        Teaching, Language & Reference
        August 2022

        Dividing the spoils

        Perspectives on military collections and the British empire

        by Henrietta Lidchi, Stuart Allan

        At a time of heightened international interest in the colonial dimensions of museum collections, Dividing the Spoils provides new perspectives on the motivations and circumstances whereby collections were appropriated and acquired during colonial military service. Combining approaches from the fields of material anthropology, imperial and military history, this book argues for a deeper examination of these collections within a range of intercultural histories that include alliance, diplomacy, curiosity and enquiry, as well as expropriation and cultural hegemony. As museums across Europe reckon with the post-colonial legacies of their collections, Dividing the Spoils explores how the amassing of objects was understood and governed in British military culture, and considers how objects functioned in museum collections thereafter, suggesting new avenues for sustained investigation in a controversial, contested field.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2018

        Learning femininity in colonial India, 1820–1932

        by Tim Allender, Andrew Thompson, John M. MacKenzie

        Learning femininity in colonial India explores the colonial mentalities that shaped and were shaped by women living in colonial India between 1820 and 1932. Using a broad framework the book examines the many life experiences of these women and how their position changed, both personally and professionally, over this long period of study. Drawing on a rich documentary record from archives in the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North America, Ireland and Australia this book builds a clear picture of the colonial-configured changes that influenced women interacting with the colonial state. This book will appeal to students and academics working on the history of empire and imperialism, gender studies, postcolonial studies and the history of education.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        The French empire between the wars

        Imperialism, politics and society

        by Martin Thomas

        By considering the distinctiveness of the inter-war years as a discrete period of colonial change, this book addresses several larger issues, such as tracing the origins of decolonization in the rise of colonial nationalism, and a re-assessment of the impact of inter-war colonial rebellions in Africa, Syria and Indochina. The book also connects French theories of colonial governance to the lived experience of colonial rule in a period scarred by war and economic dislocation.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        The French empire at War, 1940–1945

        by Martin Thomas

        The French empire at war draws on original research in France and Britain to investigate the history of the divided French empire - the Vichy and the Free French empires - during the Second World War. What emerges is a fascinating story. While it is clear that both the Vichy and Free French colonial authorities were only rarely masters of their own destiny during the war, preservation of limited imperial control served them both in different ways. The Vichy government exploited the empire in an effort to withstand German-Italian pressure for concessions in metropolitan France and it was key to its claim to be more than the mouthpiece of a defeated nation. For Free France too, the empire acquired a political and symbolic importance which far outweighed its material significance to the Gaullist war effort. As the war progressed, the Vichy empire lost ground to that of the Free French, something which has often been attributed to the attraction of the Gaullist mystique and the spirit of resistance in the colonies. In this radical new interpretation, Thomas argues that it was neither of these. The course of the war itself, and the initiatives of the major combatant powers, played the greatest part in the rise of the Gaullist empire and the demise of Vichy colonial control.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        Europeanisation as violence

        Souths and Easts as method

        by Kolar Aparna, Daria Krivonos, Elisa Pascucci

        The book offers a novel lens to situate Europeanisation as violence - through institutions and technologies of development, cultural heritage, and borders, among others - by bringing South and East within a relational frame. Through four inter-related sections, it foregrounds Europeanisation as infrastructural violence and colonial asymmetries, slow violence and the construction of stratified subalternities, epistemic dispossession, and border epistemologies.

      • Trusted Partner
        June 2026

        Little wars of empire

        British veterans in a colonial world, c.1885–1918

        by Taylor Soja

        Little Wars of Empire is a group biography of British veterans who experienced multiple wars across the British empire. Throughout the nineteenth century, Britain was constantly at war in its colonies, defending against anti-colonial resistance or trying to expand its influence. The veterans of these wars did not disappear once they were over, and many of them went on to later experience World War I. By using personal sources such as letters, diaries, and photograph albums, this book works to show how colonial violence and British military history depend upon one another, and argues that colonial war fundamentally shaped the British experience of empire. This was true for all kinds of British veterans, from British Army soldiers and officers to nurses and military families, whose experiences demonstrate the central place of colonial violence to British life.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        November 2023

        Colouring the Caribbean

        Race and the art of Agostino Brunias

        by Mia L. Bagneris

        Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour - so called 'Red' and 'Black' Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race - made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Brunias's paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Brunias's work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Crowns and colonies

        European monarchies and overseas empires

        by Robert Aldrich, Cindy McCreery

        Queen Victoria, who also bore the title of Empress of India, had a real and abiding interest in the British Empire, but other European monarchs also ruled over possessions 'beyond the seas'. This collection of original essays explores the connections between monarchy and colonialism, from the old regime empires down to the Commonwealth of today. With case studies drawn from Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, the chapters analyse constitutional questions about the role of the crown in overseas empires, the pomp and pageantry of the monarchy as it transferred to the colonies, and the fate of indigenous sovereigns under European colonial control. Crowns and colonies, with chapters on North America, Asia, Africa and Australasia, provides new perspectives on colonial history, the governance of empire, and the transnational history of monarchies in modern Europe.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        June 2021

        Insanity, identity and empire

        Immigrants and institutional confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910

        by Catharine Coleborne

        Insanity, identity and empire examines the formation of colonial social identities inside the institutions for the insane in Australia and New Zealand. Taking a large sample of patient records, it pays particular attention to gender, ethnicity and class as categories of analysis, reminding us of the varied journeys of immigrants to the colonies and of how and where they stopped, for different reasons, inside the social institutions of the period. It is about their stories of mobility, how these were told and produced inside institutions for the insane, and how, in the telling, colonial identities were asserted and formed. Having engaged with the structural imperatives of empire and with the varied imperial meanings of gender, sexuality and medicine, historians have considered the movements of travellers, migrants, military bodies and medical personnel, and 'transnational lives'. This book examines an empire-wide discourse of 'madness' as part of this inquiry.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2026

        Border enclaves

        Melilla and the making of Europe’s southern periphery

        by Laia Soto Bermant

        Border enclaves examines the Spanish enclave of Melilla as a prism for understanding Europe's contemporary dislocations. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, it explores how borders are enforced, contested and inhabited in a city suspended between Africa and Europe, colonial legacies and modern regimes. Through a polyphonic narrative following smugglers, migrants, teachers and politicians, it reveals how everyday practices and symbolic performances shape life in the enclave. Selective visibility-who is seen or erased-structures authority and exclusion. Situating Melilla within broader processes like Spain's colonial history and Europe's border restructuring, the book argues that its fragmented sovereignties and external dependencies make it a paradigmatic site for grasping Europe's precarious margins. It calls for an ethnographic lens attuned to dislocation as both lived experience and analytic tool.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2010

        Law, history, colonialism

        The reach of empire

        by Diane Kirkby, Andrew Thompson, Catharine Coleborne, John Mackenzie

        Drawing on the latest contemporary research from an internationally acclaimed group of scholars, Law, history, colonialism brings together the disciplines of law, history and post-colonial studies in a singular exploration of imperialism. In fresh, innovative essays from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection offers exciting new perspectives on the length and breadth of empire. As issues of native title, truth and reconciliation commissions, and access to land and natural resources are contested in courtrooms and legislation of former colonies, the disciplines of law and history afford new ways of seeing, hearing and creating knowledge. Issues explored include the judicial construction of racial categories, the gendered definitions of nation-states, the historical construction of citizenship, sovereignty and land rights, the limits to legality and the charting of empire, constructions of madness among colonised peoples, reforming property rights of married women, questions of legal and historical evidence, and the rule of law. This collection will be an indispensable reference work to scholars, students and teachers. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Science and society in southern Africa

        by Saul Dubow

        This collection, dealing with case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Mauritius, examines the relationship between scientific claims and practices, and the exercise of colonial power. It challenges conventional views that portray science as a detached mode of reasoning with the capacity to confer benefits in a more or less even-handed manner. That science has the potential to further the collective good is not fundamentally at issue, but science can also be seen as complicit in processes of colonial domination. Not only did science assist in bolstering aspects of colonial power and exploitation, it also possessed a significant ideological component: it offered a means of legitimating colonial authority by counter-poising Western rationality to native superstition and it served to enhance the self-image of colonial or settler elites in important respects. This innovative volume ranges broadly through topics such as statistics, medicine, eugenics, agriculture, entomology and botany.

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