History of the British Empire

Olga Tufnell’s ‘Perfect Journey’

By Jack Green and Ros Henry

Blog published on TrowelBlazers, April 26, 2021.

https://trowelblazers.com/olga-tufnells-perfect-journey/

Excerpt:  Olga Tufnell (1905‒1985) was a British archaeologist who mainly worked in Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s, whose archive of letters and photographs are housed at the Palestine Exploration Fund, London. She is best known for her scholarly publications on the excavations of Tell ed-Duweir (ancient Lachish), as well scarabs and stamp seals from the East Mediterranean. You can read her full TrowelBlazers bio here. Tufnell’s reminiscences and letters provide insights into dig life during the so-called “golden age” of archaeology in the Holy Land, and the wider cultural, political, and gendered context of fieldwork within Mandate Palestine.

In our new open access book entitled Olga Tufnell’s “Perfect Journey.” Letters and Photographs of an Archaeologist in the Levant and Mediterranean (UCL Press), we present her letters from this period for the first time. They provide a personal account of her experiences, shedding light on travel and dig life during extraordinary times.

The letters offer insights into social and professional networks and the history of archaeology. They provide a contemporary view of the role of foreign archaeologists, relationships with local workers and their families, and the colonial frameworks within which they operated. The letters are important because they give Olga Tufnell’s viewpoint as an individual at times and places which saw significant social and political change. The letters reflect the attitudes of the day: some static and resistant to change; others indicating the growing acceptance of women in a man’s world.

Na početku rada objašnjen je pojam transatlantske trgovine robljem, kao i uzroci porobljavanja ljudi crne rase. U ostatku rada govori se o početku trgovine, uključenju Portugala, Španjolske, Nizozemske, Engleske i Francuske u trgovanje robljem te o povezivanju s kolonijama u Sjevernoj i Južnoj Americi. Objašnjeno je i pitanje uloge afričkih kraljevstava u sudjelovanju u trgovini. Slijedi poglavlje o uvjetima prijevoza robova, a posljednja se poglavlja bave razlozima i tijekom ukidanja trgovine robljem te posljedicama te trgovine.

Edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).


Introduction - Michael Brown and Joanne Begiato
Part I: Experiencing martial masculinities
1 Burying Lord Uxbridge's leg: the body of the hero in the early nineteenth century - Julia Banister
2 Brothers in arms? Martial masculinities and family feeling in old soldiers' memoirs, 1793-1815 - Louise Carter
3 Recalling the comforts of home: bachelor soldiers' narratives of nostalgia and the re-creation of the domestic interior - Helen Metcalfe
4 Charles Incledon: a singing sailor on the Georgian stage - Anna Maria Barry
5 Visualising the aged veteran in nineteenth-century Britain: memory, masculinity and nation - Michael Brown and Joanne Begiato
Part II: Imagining martial masculinities
6 Hunger and cannibalism: James Hogg's deconstruction of Scottish military masculinities in The Three Perils of Man or War, Women, and Witchcraft! - Barbara Leonardi
7 Model military men: Charlotte Yonge and the 'martial ardour' of 'a soldier's daughter' - Susan Walton
8 'And the individual withers': Tennyson and the enlistment into military masculinity - Lorenzo Servitje
9 Charlotte Brönte's 'warrior priest': St John Rivers and the language of war - Karen Turner
10 'Something which every boy can learn': accessible knightly masculinities in children's Arthuriana, 1903-11 - Elly McCausland
11 'A story of treasure, war, and wild adventure': hero-worship, imperial masculinities, and inter-generational ideologies in H. Rider Haggard's 1880s fiction - Helen Goodman
Epilogue: gendered virtue, gendered vigour and gendered valour - Isaac Land
Index

Higher education has a history all by itself. However, there is one unique part of history that incorporates both globalization and massification of higher education in the same time period. This all occurred during 20th century colonial rule. In spite of Great Britain’s reluctance of establishing institutions of higher education within their colonies, the of World War II brought the policy of decolonization and the realization members of the soon to be independent colonies needed to be educated in order to successfully govern themselves. The majority of the literature available focused on institutions of higher education within the colonies of the British Empire during the 20th century colonial rule, during decolonization, and after decolonization with the start of the Cold War

The historian Robert Bickers wrote a book called Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003).  The book is a biography of working-class Englishman Richard Maurice Tinkler, a veteran of the horrors of the First World War (1914-18) who in 1919 became a police constable with the Shanghai Municipal Police.  As Paul French has described in Destination Shanghai (2019) and City of Devils (2018) during the 1920s and 1930s the city was a raucous patchwork of vice, glitz, hedonism and modernity, a thriving transnational metropolis marked by peaks of fortune and gaping chasms of inequality.  Western Empires, Communists, Nationalists, and the Japanese all intersected on the streets of the city, and along with warlords and gangsters they all vied to expand their economic and political influence.  Protecting the interests of the British dominated International Settlement was Tinkler’s primary function.  His ‘beat’ played host to the ‘Shanghailanders’, the white Western expatriate community who represented a beachhead for Britain’s informal empire in China, a complex maze of jurisdictions and business interests that gave Europeans a semi-colonial privileged status.

This article examines how Ladakhi songs represent cultural self-images through associated musical, textual, and visual tropes. Many songs of the past, both from the old royal house and the rural Buddhist populations, reflect the socio-political structure of Ladakhi society. Although some songs, past and present, reflect a pan-Tibetan identity, a distinct Ladakhi identity is nevertheless consistently asserted. Situated on the caravan routes between India, Tibet, China, and Central Asia, Ladakhi culture developed distinctive hybrid characteristics, including in its musical styles. The article discusses this tradition of hybridity from the 17th Century to the present day. Ladakhi music has moved into modern media space, portrayed through scholarly works, concerts, mass media, and the internet. The article examines various contemporary representations of “tradition” and ethnic identity in both traditional and popular music. Looking at Ladakhi popular music, we see further hybridity base...

Course description: More than any other secular variety of premodern writing, romances connect the literature of the Middle Ages with that of both earlier and later periods. They blend Classical myth with Celtic mystique, and oriental exotica with local concerns. Romances tell stories about King Arthur and his court, the crusades, and ancient English princes, many of which recur in the works of Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Eliot. In this course we will explore the romance tradition in England, with special attention to the origin and development of the Arthurian canon, the political meaning of Englishness and Britishness, the self-examination of courtly ethics and gender relations, and the ideological origins of the British Empire. The course will not only examine the aristocratic culture of medieval England but will also demonstrate how premodern writings inform the literature of later periods.

This article sets out the case for taking account of hotels in political geography. It argues that hotels, as key spaces of welcome, association, and entertainment between public and private, are important political sites. They provide space for the performance of political ideologies and identities, where political campaigns can be made visible, where political relations can be illuminated and translated for international audiences, and where the ‘little things’ (Thrift, 2000, 2004) that construct political geographies can be examined. Drawing on theoretical discussions of hospitality, as well as work in political
geography, it explores the politics of multi-racial hospitality in the hotels of Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, between 1958 and 1962 in order to understand late colonial politics in Southern Africa. Considering three individual hotels, the paper elaborates their role as keys spaces in the landscape of exclusive ‘European’ sociability; as crucial sites in the enactment of and resistance to the colour bar; and as vantage points on Southern Rhodesian racial politics for international guests. The papers shows that far from being peripheral to the ‘real’ politics of diplomacy and government, hotels and the hospitable practises within them can be seen as crucial elements in the construction of local, national and international politics.

This Chapter argues that the riots which rocked Malta resulting in the loss of life at the hands of British soldiers were the result of policies - mainly economic but strongly tinged with politics - which can can be traced to the turn of the 20th Century.

Opium, Silk and the Missionaries in China retells one of the largely forgotten histories between Britain and China in the 19th Century. 

Drawing on several collections using artefacts to explore the history of the Opium Wars through botanical arts and tools; historical artefacts about silk; missionary work and intercultural shared experiences in China recorded by British Missionaries throughout this period.

The exhibition includes sections looking at:

Story of the Opium Poppy species of flowering plant in the family Papaveraceae
Hong Kong taken from China as the fruits from the Opium War
'Grand Chop' my ship sailed from China with a cargo of silk
The Mission from London to Canton
Gladys Aylward rejected by the China Inland Mission for her lack of education, she went to China as an independent missionary

#TheMission

'The Mission' at a glance:  Opium, Silk and the Missionaries in China

https://vimeo.com/568182247

This article argues for the importance of the Royal Indian Navy
mutiny of 1946 in two key aspects of the transition towards
Indian independence: civilian control over the Indian military, and a competition for power between Congress and communists that undermined Indian workers and their student allies. The article begins with an investigation of the mutiny drawing on three sources: a first-person account from a lead mutineer, a communist history of the mutiny, and the papers published in the 'Towards Freedom' collection. In 1946 a handful of low-ranking sailors sparked a naval mutiny that ultimately involved upwards of 20,000 sailors, and then crashed into the streets of Bombay with revolutionary fervour. The Communist Party in Bombay seized upon the mutiny as an opportunity to rally the working class against the British raj, with the hope of ending British rule through revolution rather than negotiation. Yet the mutiny proved less of a harbinger of what was ending and more of a bellwether for what was to come. Congress, sensing the danger of the moment, snuffed out support for the mutiny, and insisted on a negotiated transfer of power. Congress’s action thereby set a precedent for civilian dominance over the military in post-independence India. At the same time, however, Congress betrayed the effectiveness of some of organised labour’s strongest advocates, namely the Communist Party, Bombay students and Bombay labour, thereby undermining their costly mass protest, and hobbling them in future conflicts against Indian capitalists.

Producing Himalayan Darjeeling: Mobile People
and Mountain Encounters/Jayeeta Sharma, University of Toronto, 2016

This article explores the social production
of Darjeeling through the social and cultural
encounters that helped transform a mountain
health resort for colonial functionaries
into a vibrant Himalayan hub for vernacular
modernity and local cosmopolitanism. While
Darjeeling’s high-altitude setting inextricably
linked it to the intense exploitation of subaltern
bodies, it evolved as a dynamic urban locality
that offered mobile individuals and groups
the opportunity to seek out new livelihoods
and realize modernistic aspirations in a
transcultural setting.

Keywords: Darjeeling, hill-station, colonial, Himalayan, mobile,
cosmopolitan, mountain.

Dopo otto anni dalla prima edizione pubblicata nel 2009 con la casa editrice Polimetrica di Monza, la ristampa di questo volume in italiano con Educatt, Università Cattolica, necessita di una breve riflessione sulle vicende sia entro l’oceano Indiano, sia entro gli studi internazionali su questa regione ormai fondamentale per le politiche e per le economie globali. Non tutto ciò che è avvenuto è stato positivo. Le guerre, la pirateria nel Corno d’Africa, il terrorismo di matrice islamica, i disastri eco-ambientali, le aggressioni nei confronti delle minoranze etnico-religiose, le tratte e i flussi migratori hanno condotto la regione alla attenzione del mondo che ha assistito alle drammatiche crisi economiche e geopolitiche internazionali. Quanto agli studi sulla regione, numerose sono state le conferenze internazionali, i simposi, i workshops, e le pubblicazioni in questi anni. Ormai sono attive più sedi che prevedono la pubblicazione di Indian Ocean Studies e includono questa tematica a pieno titolo nelle rassegne internazionali. Innanzitutto in questo arco di tempo si è tentato di definire meglio ciò che s’intende per Mare Arabico e per Oceano Indiano, con le varie accezioni e le rispettive dinamiche, non solamente geografiche; per quanto la Penisola Arabica nel suo complesso e il Sultanato dell’Oman, con le sue storiche propaggini est-africane, siano stati al centro di numerose recenti analisi, si è tenuto conto anche delle influenze entro un più ampio quadro anche geopolitico. A questo riguardo, l’impostazione passatista della necessità del ‘controllo’ politico-territoriale è stata al centro di accesi dibattiti con lo scopo di rileggere e rivedere tali dinamiche, ormai ritenute obsolete, così come ad esempio i ‘miti’ che descrissero alcune aree della Penisola Arabica e dell’Africa orientale sub-sahariana come ricchissime e lussureggianti. Rileggere questo volume è interessante per la consapevolezza della ‘pesantezza’ del passato descritto, ma ancora di più per gli strumenti di ricerca sulle realtà contemporanee, mai disgiunte dalle antecedenti. Attualmente sono in corso una serie di politiche volte all’occupazione di alcuni ‘spazi vuoti’ in quelle aree dell’interno sia della penisola Arabica, sia dell’Africa orientale per riconvertire economicamente gli equilibri e gli squilibri tra fasce costiere e interno. Progetti, questi, potenzialmente stabilizzanti, ma anche fonti di autentica preoccupazione nel lungo periodo. La questione dell’identità, e non solamente da una prospettiva antropologica, è inoltre stata al centro dei dibattiti, in quelle aree dove le persone vivono costantemente in due o più luoghi, e le successive ondate migratorie, e i rispettivi flussi, contribuiscono a significative modificazioni delle società, delle politiche e delle economie locali. L’isolamento versus aggregazione, e le loro implicazioni e conseguenze, sono certamente aspetti caratterizzanti di più litorali dell’oceano Indiano occidentale. E a questo riguardo, il termine ‘translocal’ è stato oggetto di pareri spesso discordanti. Nell’ambito delle analisi riguardanti le comunità migrate e migranti, alcuni aspetti culturali e magico-medicali da esse praticati hanno gettato luce su numerose questioni poco studiate, fortemente connesse alle principali dinamiche anche dello sviluppo. Quanto ai fenomeni dell’urbanizzazione, le comunità che progressivamente hanno composto le città swahili lungo i litorali dell’Africa orientale hanno dato vita a processi ‘d’inclusione’ ed ‘esclusione’ che non sempre si sono identificati con i processi di ‘gerarchizzazione’, tipici dell’accelerazione coloniale. Il ruolo delle famiglie swahili nelle relazioni tra le coste e l’interno est-africano di mediatori, i middlemen descritti da Middleton nel testo, non può considerarsi più valido grazie agli studi di T. Vernet. La città di Zanzibar, una città swahili, ampiamente inserita nella cultura africana è, allo stesso tempo, fortemente influenzata da culture mercantili cosmopolitiche, ma anche dalle fasi coloniali. I suoi ‘confini’ sono costituiti dalle mura, dalla fortezza di origini portoghesi, da costruzioni d’influenza asiatica e araba, e dal mare, dall’oceano Indiano: tutte apposizioni e sovrapposizioni di ‘pellicole culturali’ che coesistono nelle loro progressive omogeneizzazioni. Qui i confini ‘solidi’ e i confini ‘fluidi’ s’incontrano in luoghi che vengono continuamente definiti e ridefiniti in costanti ricerche d’identità e di spazi. La scelta della copertina è dal testo di Enrico Pottinger, dal titolo Relazione di un viaggio in Belutchistan e in una parte della Persia, pubblicato per i tipi della casa editrice Sonzogno di Milano nel 1819. Questo volume è il risultato di ricerche condotte attraverso un mondo non solamente ancora non noto, e per questo considerato esotico, misterioso, nel quale perdersi, e forse morire, ma un mondo privo di definizioni territoriali e di confini politici. Il Balochistan era totalmente sconosciuto agli europei poiché le ultime testimonianze risalivano al tempo di Alessandro Magno. Il graduale coinvolgimento dei territori medio-asiatici nelle tensioni europee dei primi decenni del diciannovesimo secolo diede inizio alle relazioni tra la regione del Khanato di Kalat e i rappresentanti del governo dell’India. L’intera area venne così a rivestire una notevole importanza geostrategica. Profonda era la curiosità e ampio l’interesse per i viaggi in ciò che viene erroneamente definito Oriente, e per tutto ciò che proveniva da quelle regioni. Henry Pottinger (1789-1856) fu Tenente, al servizio dell’East India Company nel presidio di Bombay. Non 1808 egli compì una missione esplorativa nel Sind, in India, per ordine di Lord Minto, Governatore Generale dell’India. Fra il 1809 e il 1810 il Tenente Pottinger, offertosi volontario, esplorò il Balochistan. Fu scelto da Lord Clare, Governatore Generale di Bombay per stipulare un trattato commerciale con gli Amir del Sind che venne firmato nel 1832. Con il grado di Colonnello, Henry Pottinger fu Residente nella regione di Kutch, confinante con i domini britannici dell’India. Sopravvissuto alla prima guerra anglo-afghana (1839-1842), nel 1846 divenne Alto Commissario nei territori dell’Africa meridionale; fu Governatore di Madras, nell’India sudorientale e oggi il suo ritratto si trova a Whitehall a Londra. Indubbiamente copiosa e articolata è la letteratura su quest’ampia tematica e numerosi sono gli studi che hanno contribuito alla conoscenza di queste regioni ancora oggi al centro di rivalità politico-istituzionali e socio-economiche. A questo riguardo proprio la regione pakistana del Balochistan, il porto di Gwadar ha una forte presenza cinese con copiosi investimenti economico-strategici, è in questi anni sotto attacco da parte dell’esercito governativo di Islamabad e le uccisioni e sparizioni hanno condotto a numerose richieste di rispetto dei diritti umani e di difesa anche davanti alle amministrazioni presidenziali americane, appelli purtroppo ancora senza risposte. Le coste della Penisola Arabica assistono a una importante e significativa ridefinizione di vecchie e nuove alleanze che includono la immane tragedia dello Yemen. La Somalia è una terra di morte e disperazione in seguito al sanguinoso attacco terroristico del 14 ottobre 2017 che ha lasciato quasi 400 morti a Mogadiscio, mentre le coste dell’Africa orientale vivono avvicendamenti politici molto lontani dalle libertà e dalle politiche volte al benessere delle proprie popolazioni. Il terrorismo è una realtà sia in ambito islamico sia in Europa e il sentimento di insicurezza, fragilità e paura ora pervade ogni luogo. Infine, ma di certo non da ultimo, il tema della schiavitù - nelle sue differenziazioni tra società schiavistiche e società che possiedono schiavi, ma anche nelle basi del potere e nei sistemi di subalternità - offre importanti spunti di riflessione sulla possibilità di studiare questo drammatico fenomeno globale del passato per poter comprendere come mettere fine alla tratta di esseri umani oggi nel mondo. Ambizione, questa, al centro di numerosi progetti di ricerca e studio internazionali. Rimando alla bibliografia aggiornata, priva di differenziazioni ragionate, la mia produzione scientifico-accademica dal 2009. È opportuno ricordare che a oggi gli studiosi italiani di tali aree sono ancora una minoranza, ma che fondamentale è stato, ed è, il loro contributo.
This book was the result of lifetime research studies both on the field and through archival and literature sources, conducted in Europe, Pakistan, Sultanate of Oman, and Zanzibar-Tanzania. In this study, I tried to focus on more than one littoral and on more than one region inside the Indian Ocean, with the object of analysing different perspectives both methodological and chronological. Since the first edition of this study published by Polimetrica in 2009, and throughout the years, I came across numerous new theories and interpretations, and the importance of the Indian Ocean is worldwide recognized, while when I started I was the only Italian scholar attending many international conferences where this area remained for a long time a neglected one. The fluid space of the Indian Ocean was influenced by different forces of capital and by knowledge–power nexus during and after the colonial period. The history of the Indian Ocean has gained a renewed interest as it reminds us of the greatest mobility and traversal with such an impact that it forces us to rethink how the processes of such encounters operate and what the areas stand for. Many stories remain untold inside this cosmopolitan interregional arena. The challenge is therefore great to try to reshape our understanding of Africa and Asia.

The British Empire reached its greatest extent after the First World War, by which time it covered one quarter of the earth’s surface and governed a similar proportion of the world’s population.  Yet between 1947 and 1964, Britain granted independence to most of its colonies.  Unlike other empires in history – such as the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, or Habsburg – the collapse of the British Empire was remarkably rapid.  This article outlines the chronology of British decolonization and highlights the historical debate over its causes.  It should be noted that historians disagree on the relative importance of the metropolitan (domestic British), colonial (nationalist), and international causes of British decolonization.

This essay asks what can the scholarship analysing various tourism activities within the British Empire, during the Victorian and Edwardian eras (1837-1910), contribute to the historiographies of British tourism. Through compiling and comparing a variety of touristic activities within the Empire, it argues that those case studies reveal the importance of said Empire as a contributor to (and a beneficiary of) tourism as an industry.

Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Historical Anthropology of Sindh’s Colonization addresses the nineteenth century expansion and consolidation of British colonial power in the Sindh region of South Asia. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach and employs a fine-grained, nuanced and situated reading of multiple agents and their actions. It explores how the political and administrative incorporation of territory (i.e., annexation) by East India Company informs the conversion of intra-cultural distinctions into socio-historical conflicts among the colonized and colonizers. The book focuses on colonial direct rule, rather than the more commonly studied indirect rule, of South Asia. It socio-culturally explores how agents, perspectives and intentions vary—both within and across regions—to impact the actions and structures of colonial governance.

The 1899-1902 Boer War is seemingly forgotten in Australia. There are no living veterans or days of remembrance to remind us of this conflict, which involved a military contribution that pales into insignificance in comparison to the forces that served and died in the Great War and the Second World War. Yet it was not one of Queen Victoria's "Little Wars", but a major conflict to which Britain and her colonies would eventually send nearly 450,000 troops.

In this article I pursue two main lines of argument. First, I seek to delineate two distinctive modes of justifying imperialism found in nineteenth-century political thought (and beyond). The 'liberal civilizational' model, articulated most prominently by John Stuart Mill, justified empire primarily in terms of the benefits that it brought to subject populations. Its proponents sought to 'civilize'lthe 'barbarian'. An alternative `republican' model focused instead on the benefits - glory, honour and power above all - that accrued to the imperial state. Less concerned with spreading civilization, its proponents concentrated on fortifying the imperial polity. Second, I offer a 'republican' interpretation of the writings of the historian and public moralist J.A. Froude (1818-94), arguing that he both diagnosed the problems of modern Britain and prescribed imperial solutions to those problems, based on his reading of the fate of the Roman republic.

The rise and decline of Atlantic piracy has been used to gauge the level of commercial, administrative, naval, and diplomatic control that Britain exercised in the Atlantic. Indeed, historians have suggested that by 1730, Britain had eradicated piracy in the region. These studies credit a governmental campaign of law enforcement and moral persuasion for a revolutionary shift in public attitudes against piracy. A close examination, however, reveals that piracy flourished in Atlantic waters well into the nineteenth century, and that Britain’s command of the region was not nearly as thorough as some have suggested. Old practices and beliefs regarding piracy’s legality and propriety persisted in the face of imperial attempts to effect change—Britons continued to regard “armed commerce” as wholly conventional and legitimate. Piracy was eventually ushered out of the Atlantic indirectly and inadvertently, not through forceful confrontation at sea and port, but in response to the reduced profitability of contraband.
  Britain’s ineffective anti-piracy campaign reveals the limits of British power at sea, but also on land, vis-à-vis its constituents. Violence and property losses at sea were useful to authorities in their efforts to articulate differences between the illegitimate violence of pirates and smugglers, and legitimate force wielded by the government. And yet, the government’s attempts to extend its jurisdiction beyond coastal waters, monopolize violence, and sanction some forms of maritime commerce while delegitimizing others, were consistently resisted, ignored, and thwarted by large swaths of British society on both sides of the ocean. British subjects retained an archaic and localist conception of society, state, and law, and resisted legal and bureaucratic structures put in place by landed governments to facilitate state building. 

  The chronological discrepancy regarding the passing of piracy and the resultant misconception regarding Britain’s control of the Atlantic are products of historians’ modernist definition of piracy. This anachronistic understanding of piracy obscures the continued activity of pirates in the Atlantic during the “long eighteenth century” and gives credence to the presumptions of eighteenth-century governments to monopolize the use of force at sea.

This book investigates the uses of crusader medievalism – the memory of the crusades and crusading rhetoric and imagery – in Britain, from Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825) to the end of the Second World War. It seeks to understand why and when the crusades and crusading were popular, how they fitted with other cultural trends of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, how their use was affected by the turmoil of the First World War and whether they were differently employed in the interwar years and in the 1939-45 conflict. Building on existing studies and contributing the fruits of fresh research, it brings together examples of the uses of the crusades from disparate contexts and integrates them into the story of the rise and fall crusader medievalism in Britain.

Chaos reigns—at least in the historiography of the Raj. It was once the consensus among historians that British imperial authority in the Indian subcontinent was secure for at least the century-and-a-half before the Second World War. Recently, however, this narrative has drawn a range of challenges. Prominently, Mark Condos and Jon Wilson have held that British imperial authority was chronically insecure. In their view the irrational anxiety of generations of British officials produced a chaotic administration with minimal social purchase or ideological coherence. Instead of a confident state capable of acting as it chose, these historians have limned a psychologically embattled one incapable of acting except in the abstract, small-scale, or short-term. Their bold revision succeeds in dispelling the aura of indomitability that has often surrounded the Raj, and in directing attention to its overlooked discontents and weaknesses. Yet their characterization of the British regime as constantly and pervasively anxious is more an article of faith than a conclusion warranted by evidence. Nor do they explain how, if the regime suffered from permanent ‘chaos’ or ‘insecurity’, it managed to survive for some two hundred years. At the heart of Condos and Wilson’s approach is an effort to bypass texts that results, instead, in misreading them. It is largely by reemphasizing rigorous textual methods, therefore, that Durba Ghosh offers a compelling alternative approach to the history of state vulnerability and disorder.

В последней трети XIX в. Канада представляла собой уникальное явление как в британской, так и в общемировой колониальной практике. В 70-е годы XIX в. среди общественно-политических кругов Канады широко распространилось убеждение, что новый статус их страны, её возросший материальный и духовный потенциал, укрепляющееся национальное самосознание самих канадцев требуют отказа от отношений господства-подчинения между метрополией и автономиями и реорганизации империи на принципах взаимовыгодного партнёрства. Данная статья посвящена эволюции взглядов канадской общественности на проблему взаимоотношений с Великобританией.

What is a " settler‐colonial city " and how does it differ from other forms of imperial urban spatial organization? This article seeks to answer these questions by attempting to urbanize recent insights in settler‐colonial theory. It begins by considering well‐established theorizations of the "colonial city " —particularly those developed by geographers and urbanists in the 1970s and 1980s—in order to assess their suitability for analyses of contemporary settler‐colonial milieu. Building on this discussion, the paper asks if and how the insights of settler‐colonial theory offer new opportunities to renovate earlier theorizations in ways that are more explicitly relevant to making sense of the urban process in North America and other societies where colonists have " come to stay " and no formal process of decolonization has unfolded.

ستعرض هذا البحث نشوب وتطور الصراع بين کل من بريطانيا وأسبانيا للسيطرة على القسم الشمالي من مضيق جبل طارق؛ حيث يستهدف النظر في تطور العلاقات الثنائية بين أسبانيا وبريطانيا في الإطارين الإقليمي والدولي خلال القرن العشرين في مناسبات معينة ألا وهي الحربين العالميتين، وکذلک امتداد الصراع لمنظمات إقليمية ودولية، وبخاصة الأمم المتحدة، والاتحاد الأوروبي، ومنظمة حلف شمال الأطلسي (الناتو)، وهي الهيئات التي مارست أو مازالت تمارس دور الوساطة في الصراع المزمن بين الجارتين الأوروبيتين بشأن السيطرة على جبل طارق.
ويتضح من خلال استعراض هذه الأحداث تعقيد العلاقات الأسبانية البريطانية التي تتطلب التنسيق والتعاون ضمن الجماعة الأوروبية أو خلال سنوات الحرب الباردة، في مقابل مواقف الجانبين المتصلبة حول السيادة على جبل طارق وهو ما يجعلهما حليفتين في بعض الأحيان وخصمين في وقت آخر.

Unlike other empires in history – such as the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, or Habsburg – the collapse of the British Empire was remarkably rapid. This was especially true of the British Empire in Africa, which was largely dismantled in the years 1957-1965. Historians continue to disagree on the primacy of metropolitan, colonial and international causes of British decolonization in Africa. This article will argue that colonial nationalism and an increasingly hostile international environment contributed to the timing of independence in British Africa, but these influences must also be understood against a background of changing metropolitan circumstances and the deliberate calculations of British policy-makers. This causal interlock will be demonstrated in relation to several episodes of British decolonization between 1957 and 1965, including the Gold Coast in West Africa, the East African territories of Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya, and the collapse of the Central African Federation.

This article aims to explain in a theoretical way, but with practical historical examples the complex notion of informal imperialism. First analyzing imperialism(s) and colonialism as a whole, it will then try to caracterize and categorize more specifically what is informal imperialism. Comparing imperialism with the our understanding of space, a grid of understanding is thus applied to imperialism as a whole, to then qualify and address the informality of the phenomenon, and give theoretical tools based on practical historical cases for the historian and the political scientist.

Quatre ans de recherches palpitantes pour faire revivre Enghien depuis la fin de la période autrichienne jusqu'en 1815. Découvrons ensemble le duc Louis-Engelbert d'Arenberg, seigneur d'Enghien, aveugle à 20 ans, spolié de ses avoirs en Germanie lors de la Confédération du Rhin et finalement, nommé sénateur impérial par Napoléon. Pourquoi est-il devenu franc-maçon et comment la franc-maçonnerie s'est-elle établie dans nos régions au XVIIIe siècle ? Que dire du fils du duc, le prince Prosper-Louis qui leva le régiment des chevau-légers du duc d'Arenberg à l'origine du 27e régiment belge des chasseurs à cheval ? Le canton d'Enghien, pris dans les serres de l'Aigle impérial, livra 475 conscrits qui, intégrés dans la Grande Armée, se sacrifièrent aux quatre coins de l'Europe.

SUMMARY
This essay discusses relations of Papuans with foreign incomers from first known contact up to 1884, when a British Protectorate was proclaimed over south-east New Guinea. The area covered is that of the future Protectorate together with Torres Strait, both initially part of a single cultural continuum. A variety of significant personalities, Papuan and foreign, are portrayed.
The scene is set by a characterisation of Papuan society as viewed by white men in the later nineteenth century, particularly of aspects that coloured relationships between Papuans and foreigners. Early explorers and their contacts with Papuans are next discussed, starting with Torres in 1606, followed by Cook, Bligh of the Bounty, Flinders and others, and then by the 1840s surveying voyages of HM ships Fly, Bramble and Rattlesnake, with the unique story of Barbara Thompson, discovered by the Rattlesnake after living marooned for some years among the Kaurareg people of Torres Straits.
A new phase begins in the 1860s with the development of the Torres Strait bêche-de-mer and pearl-shell fisheries, and the subsequent arrival of the London Missionary Society, each contributing to the transformation of Torres Strait societies. From 1873-4 interest expands to the mainland and islands of south-east New Guinea, including missionary and trading activity, the Papuan response, periodic naval intervention, the 1878 Port Moresby gold-rush, and especially the labour trade interlude of 1884, with the atrocities of the Hopeful.
A separate chapter narrates the build-up of British and Australian interest in New Guinea, culminating in 1884 with the proclamation of the Protectorate. This is followed by an analysis of ensuing murders which cast light on the interplay of Papuans and foreigners. The essay concludes with remarks on the many-sided question of how “civilisation” confronted “savagery” in Papua - a recurrent theme of contemporary observers.