Women Educators’ Sojourns Around the British Empire from the Interwar Years to the Mid-Twentieth Century

Author(s):  
Kay Whitehead
2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.


2017 ◽  
Vol II (1) ◽  
pp. 44-56
Author(s):  
Haseeb Ur Rehman Warrich ◽  
Muhammad Rehman ◽  
Sahrish Jamil

No other element impacted the historical conditions of the preceding 100 years to such an extent as the war to secure and control the world's reserves of petroleum. Sustainable economic growth after 1873, that discouraged British Empire, arose mechanical economies in Europe. Central Asia remained the object of rivalries and machination by the giant countries of the Europe. World Domination Games started from Pillage Games that lead towards many “Games” such as Great Game, New Great Game, Game Changer and New Game Changer. All prefect countries desire to have a control over the world for the last two centuries. Their efforts turn into numerous clashes and clashes led towards wars. In the twentieth century wars transformed not only their names but also their genetics that has profound impact on the 21st Century. This laid foundation of the emerging new superpowers in every century.


Author(s):  
SIN YI CHEUNG ◽  
ANTHONY HEATH

Britain has long been home to migrants from Ireland (which until 1921 had been part of the United Kingdom). More recently, it has seen major inflows from a number of less-developed countries such as Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, and Hong Kong that had formerly been part of the British Empire. While there is some reason to believe that the Irish experienced some discrimination in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century or before, evidence implies that the Irish, both first and second generation, now compete on equal terms with the indigenous British. The ethnic penalties experienced by the visible minorities from the less-developed members of the Commonwealth have declined markedly in the second generation, but all the major visible minorities still find it more difficult to obtain jobs commensurate with their qualifications than do the various white groups, even in the second generation. Continuing discrimination against visible minorities is likely to be a major part of the explanation for the difficulty in gaining employment.


Author(s):  
Robert Holland

This chapter examines the history of Great Britain, the British Commonwealth, and the end of the British Empire in the twentieth century, suggesting that the twentieth century ended in Britain as it began, with the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom a contested and vital subject of public discourse. It concludes that the transitions that characterised the Empire-Commonwealth over the twentieth century were ultimately constrained within the due process of British constitutionalism.


2020 ◽  
pp. 303-314
Author(s):  
Stefan Manz ◽  
Panikos Panayi

This chapter begins by highlighting the main findings of the book, including the globalization of internment by the Empire during the Great War and the consequences for individuals and their families, but also the fact that Britain treated those it had incarcerated in a humane way. The chapter examines the return to Germany, its consequences for individuals, and the way in which the German authorities dealt with the former residents of the British Empire. These people, who may not have seen their homeland for decades, made efforts to preserve the memory of their experiences, along with former civilian and military prisoners who came from other states at war with Germany. While the memory of internment may have survived into the interwar years, it disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century, but came back to life in the early twenty-first century, inspired by the centenary of the Great War.


Author(s):  
Tobias Harper

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 231-236
Author(s):  
Bill Bell

The epilogue rounds off the argument by returning to Crusoe as a paradigm of the act of reading in the British empire. In the hands of different readers not even Robinson Crusoe was as straightforward as it seemed. Despite the fact that the novel has often been read as a manual for empire, it is far more complex than some commentaries would have us believe. Similar ambivalences apply to the lives and minds of many overseas British in the long nineteenth century. While the early twentieth century is commonly thought to have embodied a decline in imperial values, the reading habits of colonial subjects throughout the period would seem to indicate that imperial assurances were less robust than official sources would seem to suggest. The five reading constituencies that are described in the foregoing chapters, all of them in different ways operating within the web of empire, were ones in which individuals often found imperial confidence in its own mission wanting, something that was time and again demonstrated through in their acts of reading.


2021 ◽  
pp. 266-292
Author(s):  
Yin Cao

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of thousands of Sikhs emigrated from Punjab to Southeast and East Asia to purse a better livelihood. At the same time, the Singh Sabha Movement was gradually gaining momentum in Punjab, strengthening the Sikh identity. Furthermore, Sikh soldiers and policemen were deployed widely in Asia to safeguard the interests of the British Empire. This chapter argues that the three seemingly irrelevant historical events (the modern Sikh diaspora, the Singh Sabha Movement, and the Indian expedition during the Boxer Uprising in China) were essentially interrelated. The convergent point of these moments was the erection of a Sikh temple (gurdwara) on Queen’s Road East, Wanchai, Hong Kong Island, in 1902. Taking this event as a case study, this chapter seeks to explore the Singh Sabha Movement through the lens of the Sikh diasporic network and the imperial network. It also unveils the Indian face of the British Empire by the turn of the twentieth century, when Indians, rather than the British, were the protagonists and engineers.


Author(s):  
John Nott

Summary Throughout the twentieth century it was widely assumed that African diets were grossly deficient in protein, that childhood protein deficiency was a natural result of this generalised diet and that a relative lack of meat and milk went some way to explaining African economic underdevelopment. This article explores why these conclusions took hold; the European deification of animal protein in previous centuries; structural changes to African diets and food economies under colonial government; and the political value of such a consensus. Unlike elsewhere in the world, where deficiency was removed from the exceptionalism of tropical medicine, protein malnutrition was constructed as a particularly African concern. Focusing this discussion on the history of the severe childhood deficiency, kwashiorkor, this article explores how the politically informed othering of African nutrition came to direct, or misdirect, the medicine of malnutrition in twentieth-century Africa.


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