43,352 research outputs found
Exporting empire: Africa, colonial officials and the construction of the British imperial state, c.1900?39
No full textFor Africans, rank and file colonial officials were the most visible manifestation of British imperial power. But in spite of their importance in administering such vast imperial territories, the attitudes of officials who served between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War, as well as what shaped such attitudes, have yet to be examined in any systematic way.In this original and revisionist work, Prior draws upon an enormous array of private and official papers to address some key questions about the colonial services. How did officials’ education and training affect the ways that they engaged with Africa? How did officials relate to one another? How did officials seek to understand Africa and Africans? How did they respond to infrastructural change? How did they deal with anti-colonial nationalism? This work will be of value to students and lecturers alike interested in British, imperial and African history
An empire gone bad: Agatha Christie, Anglocentrism and decolonization
No full textRecent scholarly accounts of early post-war society have emphasized the importance of positive and self-congratulatory narratives of decolonization – whereby the end of empire was the inevitable result of a pro-active British beneficence – or have suggested that society was shielded from a sense of imperial decline. Such accounts are complicated by Agatha Christie’s immensely popular crime novels, which constructed a narrative of British decline rooted in a sense of departure from pre-war ideals of imperial masculinity, but whose Anglocentrism nevertheless offered up the potential for imperial renewal pending a ‘rediscovery’ of such characteristics
"A brotherhood of Britons?”: public schooling, esprit de corps and colonial officials in Africa, c.1900-39
No full textHistorians have tended to suggest that Britain's colonial officials demonstrated an esprit de corps, and that this is testament to the efficacy of public schooling in generating social cohesion. Examining Britain's officials in seven different colonies in sub‐Saharan Africa, this article will argue that differences in working conditions, approaches to work and officials' backgrounds, such as conflicts between officials from ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ backgrounds, all caused deep fragmentations in the colonial services. Most significantly, officials were irreconcilably torn between a need for company as a means of maintaining morale, and a desire for freedom from the constraints of colonial society. Living in insular communities driven by gossip and marked by the need to keep up appearances for fear of ostracism from their peers, officials felt unable to experience an ‘authentic’ Africa and live out the romanticized dreams of individualism that had motivated many to leave for Africa in the first place. This sense of feeling trapped bred resentment towards one's fellow officials. Consequently, public schools were unable to surmount other factors in shaping how officials regarded one other
DIPOLE STABILIZING RODS SYSTEM FOR A FOUR-VANE RFQ : MODELING AND MEASUREMENT ON THE TRASCO RFQ ALUMINUM MODEL AT LNL
No full textThe Dipole Stabilizing Rods (DSR’s) are devices
used in order to reduce a priori the effect
of perturbation on the operating mode of
a four-vane RFQ caused by neighboring dipole modes by increasing the frequency spacing between the TE210 mode
and dipole modes, without, in principle, affecting the quadrupole TE210 mode. They have proven to be particularly
useful in the case of coupled RFQ’s whose overall length is significantly greater than the operatingwavelength. In this
article we present a circuit model of such DSR’s, that, used in combination with a transmission line model of a four
vane RFQ, has allowed us to predict the dimensioning of the DSR’s in the case of the aluminum model of TRASCO
RFQ. The DSR parameters and, in general, the accuracy of the model have been also confirmed by HFSS simulations
and by RF measurements on the above-mentioned model
Review: An Empire on trial: race, murder, and justice under British Rule, 1870–1935, by Martin J. Wiener (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2009; pp. xiv + 255. £14.99).
No full textEdwardian England and the idea of racial decline: an empire’s future
No full textHistorians commonly depict Edwardian England as a place of great anxiety. Emerging from a long and exhausting conflict against the Boers in South Africa, Edwardians are often perceived as rocked by a profound set of doubts about the future of the British Empire, including the belief that the country was stricken by a malaise, commonly referred to as 'national deterioration' or 'degeneration'. Drawing upon a wide range of popular sources, this study considers the level of middle-class engagement with such strains of pessimistic thought, examining cultural life at both national and regional levels, and across a wide range of topics, including military reform, urban living, the Scouting movement and the 'hooligan' problem, thereby shedding new light on Edwardian England
Review: Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa: Genealogies of Conflict since 1800 , by Richard J. Reid (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2011; pp. xviii + 310. £65).
No full text‘This community which nobody can define’: meanings of Commonwealth in the late 1940s and 1950s
No full textAssessments of early postwar understandings of the power and potential of the Commonwealth have suggested the body either failed to shield the British public from a sense of national decline or that it comforted them that there was no need to worry about decolonization because the organization enabled the maintenance of British authority by other means. However, historians and political scientists who provided public comment on the present and future of the body in the late 1940s and 1950s complicate such assessments, wracked as they were by a profound uncertainty over what the Commonwealth could achieve. Their sense of uncertainty was not derived from a pessimistic reading of the tangible events and processes of the period that we might today assume blunted commentators’ faith in Commonwealth cohesion, such as Britain’s relationship with Europe, neutralism, apartheid, or even Suez. Instead, uncertainty over the Commonwealth’s capacity to realise a latent potential supposedly rooted in its members’ willingness to work together was rooted in something more elemental, namely sustained uncertainty regarding the nature of the body’s connections and functions. The body was judged an abstraction, a nascent and unparalleled experiment whose bonds were extensive yet impossible to measure. Its perceived opacity rendered it neither a cause for concern nor a salve to a wounded British morale
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