scholarly journals Scandal and Secrecy in the History of the Nineteenth-Century British Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Callie Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Picture ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
History Of

Abstract For historians of empire, scandals provide a useful starting point for investigating how the operations of imperial power were contested and reworked in moments of crisis. Yet, existing scholarship on imperial scandal consists mostly of case-studies that do not always reflect on the larger trend of which they are a part. This review draws on six accounts of imperial scandals to produce a general picture of the characteristics and functions of scandals in the historiography of the nineteenth-century British empire. What this comparison suggests is that imperial scandals possessed distinctive stakes and seem, as a result, to have represented periodic ruptures in longer-term patterns of local silence and complicity. Scandals, if used cautiously, can therefore provide evidence to support ongoing discussions about the logic of colonial concealment. At the same time, scandals also remind us that publicity is not a simple cure-all. By including a wider range of actors and non-governmental sources, future studies of scandal might elucidate the political limits of transparency, as well as exploring how imperial subjects negotiated gendered and racialized access to public and political platforms.

Antecedents of the Burma Road: British Plans for a Burma-China Railway in the Nineteenth Century

1962 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph C. Croizier
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Business Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Geographic Knowledge ◽  
Engineering Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Engineering Projects

Among the most obvious and durable monuments to the colonial age in Asia are the great engineering projects which have permanently transformed the physical and economic geography of the continent. Many of these have an interesting history of their own, both in the political and commercial history of the country building them and on the level of international politics. This is true not only for such successfully completed projects as the Suez Canal or the Trans-Siberian Railway, but also for great schemes which were never realized. In Southeast Asia the long-discussed Kra Canal is the most famous instance of the latter, but it is not unique. Throughout most of the second half of the Nineteenth Century the British Government and especially the British business community dallied with the idea of a rail link between the Bay of Bengal and the interior provinces of China. Those familiar with the building of the Burma Road will understand the enormous engineering problems involved in such a plan. But for most of the Nineteenth Century geographic knowledge of Southeast Asia was extremely vague and the lure of a several thousand mile shortcut to the perennially fascinating markets of China exerted a strong pull on the imagination of a commercial nation. Ultimately, international political complications and sound economic logic killed ven the idea of such a railway. But the light it throws on government — business relations within the British Empire and on imperial rivalries in Southeast Asia makes the story of the first Burma Road, the one that was never built, well worth the telling.

‘Devote the best years of their lives’: British Solutions to Natal's Defence Concerns in Nineteenth-Century Southern Africa

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Jacob Ivey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Multiple Solutions ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
European Public ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
British Colony ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
History Of

The annexation and establishment of Natal as a British colony by 1845 was an event defined by conflict and concerns for security in British Southern Africa. The threat of invasion from the nearby Zulu kingdom or the possibility of an indigenous uprising continued to cast a shadow over the growth and expansion of the colony during the following decades. In response, those living within the colony offered multiple solutions, both actual and theoretical, related to the protection and stability of this emerging colonial state, including white volunteer corps, mounted police, and even indigenous levies. This paper examines the debate that defined these proposed solutions from 1845 to the Anglo–Zulu War of 1879. Whether from within the colony itself or from other regions of the British Empire, the suggested solutions and the debate over security were illustrative of the concern about external and internal threats that permeated the European public consciousness of British Natal. Some residents of the colony offered their own military expertise (or lack thereof); others looked to the Afrikaner population as a model for control; and a small number, who did not even reside in the colony, expressed their readiness to ‘devote the best years of their lives’ to the security of the colony. Such willingness, along with the other solutions to the issue of colonial security in British Natal, sheds considerable light on the emergence of imperial power in nineteenth-century Southern Africa, and constitutes a valuable addition to the history of Natal, settler colonies more generally and the British Empire at large.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

The Foreign Policy Mechanism of the Union Of South Africa and the Development of its Diplomatic Relations (1910–1948)

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-86
Author(s):  
Alexandra Arkhangelskaya
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
The Political ◽  
Diplomatic Relations ◽  
Economic Evolution ◽  
Local Elite ◽  
History Of

The history of the formation of South Africa as a single state is closely intertwined with events of international scale, which have accordingly influenced the definition and development of the main characteristics of the foreign policy of the emerging state. The Anglo-Boer wars and a number of other political and economic events led to the creation of the Union of South Africa under the protectorate of the British Empire in 1910. The political and economic evolution of the Union of South Africa has some specific features arising from specific historical conditions. The colonization of South Africa took place primarily due to the relocation of Dutch and English people who were mainly engaged in business activities (trade, mining, agriculture, etc.). Connected by many economic and financial threads with the elite of the countries from which the settlers left, the local elite began to develop production in the region at an accelerated pace. South Africa’s favorable climate and natural resources have made it a hub for foreign and local capital throughout the African continent. The geostrategic position is of particular importance for foreign policy in South Africa, which in many ways predetermined a great interest and was one of the fundamental factors of international involvement in the development of the region. The role of Jan Smuts, who served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and from 1939 to 1948, was particularly prominent in the implementation of the foreign and domestic policy of the Union of South Africa in the focus period of this study. The main purpose of this article is to study the process of forming the mechanisms of the foreign policy of the Union of South Africa and the development of its diplomatic network in the period from 1910 to 1948.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nurit Yaari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
State Of Israel

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.

scholarly journals The Politics of Gift Exchange in Early Qajar Iran, 1785–1834

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 550-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assef Ashraf
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political History ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Center Periphery

AbstractThis article uses gift-giving practices in early nineteenth-century Iran as a window onto statecraft, governance, and center-periphery relations in the early Qajar state (1785–1925). It first demonstrates that gifts have a long history in the administrative and political history of Iran, the Persianate world, and broader Eurasia, before highlighting specific features found in Iran. The article argues that the pīshkish, a tributary gift-giving ceremony, constituted a central role in the political culture and economy of Qajar Iran, and was part of the process of presenting Qajar rule as a continuation of previous Iranian royal dynasties. Nevertheless, pīshkish ceremonies also illustrated the challenges Qajar rulers faced in exerting power in the provinces and winning the loyalty of provincial elites. Qajar statesmen viewed gifts and bribes, at least at a discursive level, in different terms, with the former clearly understood as an acceptable practice. Gifts and honors, like the khil‘at, presented to society were part of Qajar rulers' strategy of presenting themselves as just and legitimate. Finally, the article considers the use of gifts to influence diplomacy and ease relations between Iranians and foreign envoys, as well as the ways in which an inadequate gift could cause offense.

The “Elmina Note:” Myth and Reality in Asante-Dutch Relations

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Larry W. Yarak
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of

One of the more perplexing issues in the history of Asante's relations with the Europeans on the nineteenth-century Gold Coast has been that of the origin and significance of the so-called “Elmina Note,” the pay document which authorized the Asantehene to collect two ounces of gold (or its equivalent in trade goods) per month from the Dutch authorities at Elmina. Not only have modern historians of Ghana evidenced no small amount of confusion on this matter, but during 1870/71 the Asantehene, the British, and the Dutch also disagreed strongly over the political significance of the note, as the Dutch negotiated to cede their “possessions” on the Gold Coast to the British. Failure to resolve these disagreements contributed significantly to the Asante decision to invade the British “protected” territories in 1873. This action in turn led to the British invasion of Asante in 1874, which most historians agree constitutes a critical watershed in Asante history. Clearly, the matter of the “Elmina Note” (or kostbrief as it was known to the Dutch) is one of some historical and historiographical importance. An examination of the relevant Dutch, Danish, and British documentation now makes possible a resolution of the major questions concerning its origin and meaning.The debates between the Asante, the British, and the Dutch show that in the later nineteenth century there was considerable agreement over certain issues: first, no one disputed that the Dutch had for some time past paid to the Asantehene (actually to an envoy dispatched by the king to Elmina) a stipend (or kostgeld, as the Dutch termed it) of two ounces of gold per month, or twentyfour ounces per year.

The River of Salvation Flows Through Africa: Edward Wilmot Blyden, Raphael Armattoe, and the Redemption of the Culture Concept

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Hanretta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Social Group ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nobel Peace Prize ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Culture Concept

The concept of culture, in the Boasian sense of the learned, variable, and mutable “structures” underlying “the behavior of the individuals composing a social group collectively and individually,” has played an important role in the production of knowledge about many human societies. This chapter examines two moments in the history of the culture concept as applied to West Africa. First, a moment during the process of the concept's formation in the mid-nineteenth century; second, a moment in the 1950s that revealed the political limits of appeals to culture. Juxtaposing the lives of Edward Wilmot Blyden, the father of Pan-Africanism, and the Ghanaian doctor and poet Raphael Armattoe, one of the first Africans nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the chapter illuminates the diverse networks and shifting political valences that shaped the rise, redemption, and circumscription of the culture concept in Africa from colonialism to neoliberalism.

scholarly journals Soldiers & Colonists: Imperial Soldiers as Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
John McLellan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Land Grants ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Arrival ◽  
Government Records ◽  
Decision To Stay

<p>The approximately 18,000 imperial troops who arrived in New Zealand with the British regiments between 1840 and 1870 as garrison and combat troops, did not do so by choice. However, for the more than 3,600 non-commissioned officers and rank and file soldiers who subsequently discharged from the army in New Zealand, and the unknown but significant number of officers who retired in the colony, it was their decision to stay and build civilian lives as soldier settlers in the colony. This thesis investigates three key themes in the histories of soldiers who became settlers: land, familial relationships, and livelihood. In doing so, the study develops an important area of settler colonialism in New Zealand history. Discussion covers the period from the first arrival of soldiers in the 1840s through to the early twentieth century – incorporating the span of the soldier settlers’ lifetimes. The study focuses on selected aspects of the history of nineteenth-century war and settlement.  Land is examined through analysis of government statutes and reports, reminiscences, letters, and newspapers, the thesis showing how and why soldier settlers were assisted on to confiscated and alienated Māori land under the Waste Lands and New Zealand Settlement Acts. Attention is also paid to documenting the soldier settlers’ experiences of this process and its problems. Further, it discusses some of the New Zealand settlements in which military land grants were concentrated. It also situates such military settlement practices in the context of the wider British Empire.  The place of women, children, and the regimental family in the soldier settlers’ New Zealand lives is also considered. This history is explored through journals, reminiscences, biography and newspapers, and contextualised via imperial and military histories. How and where men from the emphatically male sphere of the British Army met and married women during service in New Zealand is examined, as are the contexts in which they lived their married lives. Also discussed are the contrasting military and colonial policies towards women and marriage, and how these were experienced by soldier settlers and their families.  Lastly, the livelihood of soldier settlers is explored – the thesis investigating what sort of civilian lives soldier settlers experienced and how they made a living for themselves and their families. Utilising newspapers, reminiscences, biography, and government records the diversity of work army veterans undertook in the colony is uncovered. Notable trends include continued military-style roles and community leadership. The failed farming enterprise is also emphasised. Going further, it offers analysis of the later years of life and the different experiences of soldier settlers in their twilight years, particularly for those with and without family networks in the colony. The thesis challenges the separation between ‘war’ and ‘settlement’ by focusing on a group whose history spanned both sides of the nineteenth-century world of colony and empire.</p>

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