Taxing America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin du Rivage
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Military Aid ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
British Military

This chapter tackles the questions over how best to reconcile the demands of colonial defense with the interests of the British Empire. Americans had repeatedly demanded British military aid, raised large sums of money for the king's troops, and praised the empire as a force for good. And although there is little doubt that colonial assemblies clashed with royal governors, they often worked closely together to expand colonial fiscal-military states. But, as in Britain, the growth of armies, taxes, and debts created new burdens and stirred intense controversy. However, these conflicts were not, fundamentally, between localists and imperialists or libertarians and statists; rather, they were between radical Whigs and authoritarian reformers. They turned on competing conceptions of political economy and government, and they exposed deep ideological rifts within colonial society.

From Small Wars to Guerrilla Warfare: Imperial School of British Military Thought During the Interbellum

2021 ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Stanislav Malkin
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Guerilla Warfare ◽  
Small Wars ◽  
British Military ◽  
The Face ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
The Military

The Interbellum era was marked by the competition of various interpretations of guerrilla warfare and small wars, which were a practical expression of rebel activity in the colonies and on the outskirts of the British Empire. Discussions in that regard reflected both theoretical and doctrinal contradictions and the bureaucratic rivalry between the departments responsible for its internal security and the confrontation between the military and civilian authorities over the boundaries of their responsibility to preserve colonial order. The evolution of the meaning of the concept of “guerilla warfare” within the British military thought in the first half of the 20th century is demonstrated by highlighting the stages of the process, historical reconstruction of the levels of discussion of this topic in a professional environment, and identifying the degree of mutual influence of its basic provisions in the face of budgetary constraints and new challenges to colonial rule after the First World War. This approach allowed to specify ideas about the place and role of the army in the functioning of the internal security system of the British Empire at the final stage of its existence. The analysis of the semantics and content of the “guerilla warfare” concept between two world wars makes it possible to apply a new approach to the issue of disagreements between the military and civilian authorities over the choice of the military and political course in the conflicts of this kind. Thus, the identified differences may be viewed as a result not of the bureaucratic differences only, but as the absence of the unified understanding of the “modern rebellion” problem among the military as itself.

Leonard Howard Lloyd Irby

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Kirsten A. Greer
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Wild Birds ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Strait Of Gibraltar ◽  
Place Making ◽  
Military Officer ◽  
British Military ◽  
Important Landmark ◽  
The Mediterranean

Chapter 4 analyzes the ways in which ideas, practices, and performances of ornithology helped to sustain territorial maintenance and British imperial place-making in the Strait of Gibraltar by focusing on the work of Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Howard Lloyd Irby (Ninetieth and Seventy-Fourth Regiments). Located in the Mediterranean, the island-like territory of Gibraltar emerged as a strategic geopolitical position in the preservation of the British Empire and served as part of the “artery of empire” that linked Britain to India. It was also an important landmark in the British imagination as a result of the Great Siege (1783) and its resonance for Horatio Nelson in the Napoleonic Wars. This chapter demonstrates how narratives of wild birds and scientific performances surrounding the British military officer attempted to legitimize Gibraltar as an imperial, noble, and masculine pillar of empire, and to extend imperial interests into Morocco and Tangier.

Empire and Indifference

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-842
Author(s):  
Utathya Chattopadhyaya
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Political Freedoms ◽  
Anthropological Literature

The Caribbean's middleness within anthropological literature has been recognized and progressively untangled by scholars like Sidney Mintz and David Scott. The dialectics that figure the Caribbean as a perennially contingent space, always embodying too little and too much of the values that bound discourses of colonial modernity, frame the arguments in both Victorian Jamaica and Empire of Neglect. Both books respond to the problem of an ill-fitting Caribbean, especially after the formal abolition of slavery gave way to apprenticeships and inaugurated an uneven process of gaining political freedoms. Victoria's six-decade reign over the British Empire witnessed the expansion of liberal capitalism, reformulations of state and planter relationships, and movements for political rights under empire. Insurgencies and rebellions dotted the landscape of empire, from India (1857–59) and Jamaica (1865) to the Zulu territories (1879) and Alexandria in Egypt (1879–82). Empire responded to subjects who exposed its shaky footings through greater repression, social reform, and ballasting the civilizing mission from above. From below, colonized subjects inhabited empire in resistant, calculative, and often contradictory modes that revealed the undoing of imperial ambitions in practice. The Caribbean's marginalization in post-emancipation political economy, as the British Empire occupied more territory in Africa and Asia, produced many such complex habitations of empire that superficially may appear, pace Mintz, to be culturally midway between there and here.

Violent Loyalties

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane G.V. McGaughey
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Lower Canada ◽  
Irish Famine ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Great Irish Famine ◽  
Gender And Migration ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Migration

Upper and Lower Canada were parts of the Irish Diaspora that presented strong representations of Irish masculinities and deeply-held beliefs about Irish manliness in the decades prior to the Great Irish Famine. While histories of the famine and of the Irish in Canada in the second half of the nineteenth century continue to garner important attention and scholarship, the aim of this history is to relate and reposition the stories of earlier Irish male migrants to the Canadas so that their gendered, violent, and loyal experiences can take their place within the larger story of gender and migration across the Irish Diaspora. Using various case studies from the period of 1798 until 1841, this book argues that Irishmen living in the Canadas were the subject of a vast array of manly constructions and representations. Their involvement in creating, sustaining, or destroying these images and stereotypes had lasting positive and negative effects depending upon one’s position within colonial society. For those who prospered because of how Irish manliness was seen and understood, the themes of gender, violence, and loyalty were part of how they embedded themselves within the fabric of the Canadian colonies and the wider British Empire. For those who were treated poorly because of presumptions made about their manhood, their capacity for violence, or their Irish ethnicity, the Canadas could be an unfriendly and dismissive space. ‘Irishness’ in this period was experienced and defined very differently by individual Irishmen and by the collective fraternities they embodied.

British India as a Problem in Political Economy: Comparing James Steuart and Adam Smith

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Travers
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Political ◽  
British India ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Imperial Politics ◽  
Indian Affairs ◽  
Distinct Branch ◽  
Conceptual Resources

The consolidation of political economy as a distinct branch of the science of politics was simultaneous with the expansion and diversification of the overseas British Empire. This new political economy was often regarded as distant from the enterprise of imperial expansion. Political economists criticized the mercantile system of restricted colonial trades and monopoly corporations. This chapter discusses the political economy in relation to the imperial politics in India. It takes into focus the problems of imperial politics in India, the first of which was that the East India Company’s growing empire barely fitted into the notions of a British ‘empire of liberty’ which was perceived to be ‘commercial, Protestant, maritime, and free’; and the second was the British ignorance of and lack of sympathy for local customs and manners. In the chapter, the British theorists James Steuart and Adam Smith are closely examined. Both addressed the emerging empire of British India as a dilemma in political economy. Their thinking on Indian affairs posed challenges to the Company rule in India, but at the same time offered theoretical and conceptual resources for the unpopular Company government.

Sons of Liberty, Sons of Licentiousness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin du Rivage
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Sons Of Liberty ◽  
Economic Anxiety ◽  
Political Scene

This chapter shows how colonists responded to the transformation of the British Empire. Radical resistance gained strength from economic anxiety and the fact that authoritarian imperial reform was clearly and explicitly designed to subordinate the colonial economy. American radicals, far from being libertarians, were fully committed to using the power of government to achieve their goals. They used the language of political economy to argue for a boycott of British goods, believing that this not only would stimulate American manufacturing but would make the colonies less dependent on the mother country. When a majority of colonists, who were keen observers of Britain's political scene, became convinced that authoritarian reformers had taken control of Westminster and Whitehall, they declared their independence.

scholarly journals British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Andrea Major
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
South Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Central India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
North Central ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Company Governance ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.

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