Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 256-264
Author(s):  
Inge Van Hulle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trial And Error ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The conclusion revisits the key findings of the previous chapters. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of increased British presence in West Africa and one in which traditional normative commercial patterns with African polities were challenged through the introduction of new legal techniques and the re-interpretation of old ones. Such experimentation with legal techniques was often haphazard, improvisational, and a process of trial and error which escaped the control of the metropole and in which local protagonists took centre-stage. International legal discourse was characteristically open-ended, which allowed imperial protagonists to apply legal norms as much as possible to the benefit of varied imperial objectives. These findings paints a vastly different and more nuanced picture of British empire-building that has traditionally relied on a limited set of sources and particularly on the discourse of late nineteenth-century legal scholars.

Anglican Emigrant Chaplaincy in the British Empire and Beyond,c.1840–1900

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 314-327
Author(s):  
Rowan Strong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Involvement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

In the 1840s the Church of England, through the agency of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), established an official chaplaincy to emigrants leaving from British ports. The chaplaincy lasted throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. It was revitalized in the 1880s under the direction of the SPCK in response to a surge in emigration from Britain to the colonies. This article examines the imperial attitudes of Anglicans involved in this chaplaincy network, focusing on those of the 1880s and 1890s, the period of high imperialism in Britain. It compares these late nineteenth-century outlooks with those of Anglicans in the emigrant chaplaincy of the 1840s, in order to discern changes and continuities in Anglican imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain. It finds that, in contrast to the imperialist attitudes prevalent in Britain during the late nineteenth century, Anglicans in this chaplaincy network focused more on the ecclesiastical and pastoral dimensions of their work. Indeed, pro-imperial attitudes, though present, were remarkably scarce. It was the Church much more than the empire which mattered to these Anglicans, notwithstanding their direct involvement with the British empire.

Ordering Empire and Democracy, 1902–1921

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-67
Author(s):  
Tobias Harper
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
British Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Opening Up

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.

John Sarbah, the elder, and African mercantile entrepreneurship in the Gold Coast in the late nineteenth Century

1973 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond E. Dumett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Ivory Coast ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Distinguished Group

The trading career of John Sarbah of Ghana is illustrative of the activities of a distinguished group of independent African coastal merchants in the late nineteenth century, and an analysis of his business methods helps to cast light on the general problems and operations of mercantile entrepreneurship in West Africa. The rise of the African merchants was the result of an interaction between indigenous and external factors. It would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of the coastal trading sector in the development of the total economy of the country in the late nineteenth century; but it would appear that the major African merchants, led by John Sarbah, F. C. Grant, J. W. Sey and others, played a larger part in commercial development, 1865 to about 1895, than is commonly recognized in historical accounts. Sarbah's entrepreneurship was mainfested in his ability to manage with competence a network of stores and trading stations, to extend the market for manufactured merchandise, to open up new sources for cash export, and to assess risks and invest capital in his firm's expanision. Of particular importance were Sarbah's efforts to stimulate the collection and processing of palm kernels, to help lay a groundwork for the development of the rubber trade in Asin and Lower Denkyera in the early 1880s, and to extend the orbit of his trading operations to the southeastern Ivory Coast.

From Sail to Steam: the Impact of the Steamship Services on the British Palm Oil Trade with West Africa, 1850–1890.

1989 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Lynn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Palm Oil ◽  
West African ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Impact

In the late nineteenth century the West African palm oil trade entered a period of difficulties, characterized mainly by a fall in prices from the early 1860s. Part of the reason for this lay in the introduction of regular steamship services between Britain and West Africa from 1852. As steam came to replace sail so the palm oil trade underwent major changes. These changes can be quantified fairly precisely. One effect of the introduction of steamers was the concentration of the British side of the oil trade once again on Liverpool, its original centre. Another effect was the increase in the number of West African ports involved in the trade. The most important impact was the increase in numbers of traders in oil trade from around 25 to some 150. The resulting increased competition in the trade led to amal-gamations becoming increasingly common – a process that culminated in the formation of the African Association Ltd in 1889. It was also to provide the context for the pressure exerted by some traders for an increased colonial presence in the 1880s and 1890s.

scholarly journals Restless Spirit, Resolute Conviction: The Life and Times of Joseph ‘Ivo’ Evison

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stephen Robert John Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Career ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
Do So

<p>At first glance, Joseph Evison's life was a confusion of convictions and contradictions, played out in the pages of the many newspapers he edited and wrote for in New Zealand and Australia. A late nineteenth-century Freethinker, he would go on to edit a Catholic newspaper, just as he would readily criticise the British Empire, in spite of serving in its army and navy. Despite his obvious intricacies, historians have not been kind to Evison, reducing him to a mere one line curiosity, implying that he shifted causes to follow the money or because he was a simple contrarian at heart. However, Evison's unsettled nature means a study of his life and ideologies adds to a number of other histories including those of Freethought, Catholicism, conservatism, colonial settlers, empire, transmission of ideas, reader culture and biographical studies. This thesis therefore attempts to chronicle Evison's life, before arguing that his changing causes was down to deep-seated secularist and libertarian convictions, which left him always fighting for what he perceived as the underdog, against both the state and the Protestant majority. To do so, it not only studies his writing, which remains vibrant and engaging even today, but also his editing style at various newspapers and his speeches during a short-lived political career.</p>

scholarly journals Restless Spirit, Resolute Conviction: The Life and Times of Joseph ‘Ivo’ Evison

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stephen Robert John Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Career ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
Do So

<p>At first glance, Joseph Evison's life was a confusion of convictions and contradictions, played out in the pages of the many newspapers he edited and wrote for in New Zealand and Australia. A late nineteenth-century Freethinker, he would go on to edit a Catholic newspaper, just as he would readily criticise the British Empire, in spite of serving in its army and navy. Despite his obvious intricacies, historians have not been kind to Evison, reducing him to a mere one line curiosity, implying that he shifted causes to follow the money or because he was a simple contrarian at heart. However, Evison's unsettled nature means a study of his life and ideologies adds to a number of other histories including those of Freethought, Catholicism, conservatism, colonial settlers, empire, transmission of ideas, reader culture and biographical studies. This thesis therefore attempts to chronicle Evison's life, before arguing that his changing causes was down to deep-seated secularist and libertarian convictions, which left him always fighting for what he perceived as the underdog, against both the state and the Protestant majority. To do so, it not only studies his writing, which remains vibrant and engaging even today, but also his editing style at various newspapers and his speeches during a short-lived political career.</p>

scholarly journals Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898)

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Lahoucine Aammari
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Solid Support ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham is a less-examined British traveller who made his peregrinations into Western Barbary, or the “Land of the Furthest West,” in the late nineteenth century, the era of full-blown empire. He reveals his solid support for the British Empire and its complex discursive apparatuses. Expressing his Orientalist desire to know Moroccans as Other, this traveller claims an epistemological mastery and narrative invasion over the field of his observation. However, the traveller is not a wholly root-and-branch imperialist; he is caught between narrative mastery and a fantasy of Western Barbary as a toponym, where his different desires can be validated and an image of Moroccan society as an impenetrable, concealed domain of inaccessibility and total invisibility. These paradoxical viewpoints reveal certain discursive “heterogeneities, inconsistencies and slippages” (Lowe 1991, 7) within Graham’s travel account Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898).

Besant, Chatto, and Watt

Walter Besant ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 113-130
Author(s):  
Simon Eliot
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Agent ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Walter Besant

Walter Besant was a very successful novelist in the late nineteenth century but his income never quite matched his popularity, which rose in the 1880s and slowly fell thereafter. He did not use the royalty system in his contracts but instead sold his copyrights either outright or for a limited term to book, magazine, and newspaper publishers. This was probably an expression of his doubts about the longer-term success of his work. He was one of the earliest significant novelists to use the services of A. P. Watt, the first formal literary agent in the UK. Watt was able to farm Besant’s literary property by splitting it into UK book rights (usually sold to Chatto and Windus), foreign book rights, first serialisation rights, second serialisation rights, and syndication in various newspaper and magazine markets in the USA, Europe, and British Empire. In the 1890s Besant earned an average of £1,750 for each of his major novels. Besant claimed that Watt had increased his income significantly. There is evidence that Watt did have an effect, but that Besant becoming a solo writer after 1881 – and gaining securer income in the USA from the Chace Act (1891) – were the more important factors.

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