1,721,020 research outputs found
Edwardian 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
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
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
Review: Bonny Ibhawoh, Imperial Justice: Africans in Empire’s Court (2013), x+211 (Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, £50.00/$90.00)
No full textReview: A wider patriotism: Alfred Milner and the British Empire. By J. Lee Thompson. Pickering and Chatto, London (The Empires in Perspective Series), 2007. x + 265pp. ISBN 978 1 85196 891 6, £60.
No full textImperial engagement Review: The government and administration of Africa, 1880–1939, 5 vols. Edited by Casper Andersen and Andrew Cohen. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Pp. cxvii + 1907. $795/£450, hardback (isbn 978-1-84893-318-7).
No full textReview: Making Empire: Colonial encounters and the creation of imperial rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa, by Richard Price. (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2008; pp. xxix + 371. £50; pb. £18.99)
No full textReview: 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).
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