Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Jack Daniel Webb
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
State Actors ◽  
British State

This chapter situates the book in relation to existing scholarship on Haiti and the British Empire. In particular, it details the work’s central concern that relations between Britain and Haiti in this period were characterised by dialogue. Through cultural and intellectual exchange, Haitians and Britons impacted on the worldview’s of one another. British representations of Haiti were thus constructed in relation to the concerns and actions of Haitians as well as British domestic and imperial anxieties. To illustrate this dynamic, the chapter delves into correspondence between Haitian and British state actors and specific examples of people moving between the two. Varying instances of such migrants include Antoinette, or the ‘Woolly Woman of Hayti’ as she advertised herself to London’s crowds; or General Dubois who inspired cheers from abolitionists in his talk on Haiti. In these interactions, the chapter demonstrates, we see multiple and flexible versions of Haiti as they are negotiated between interlocutors.

scholarly journals Pirates vs. Press Gangs: The Battle for the Atlantic

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denver Brunsman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic Ocean ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
State Actors ◽  
British State ◽  
High Seas

Abstract Pirates in the Atlantic Ocean have excited imaginations ever since they stole from merchant ships and battled naval vessels in the Age of Sail. But pirates also illustrate an underappreciated process in the development of modern states and empires: the struggle between state and non-state actors to establish a monopoly of violence on the high seas. This essay traces this contest over violence in three stages: (1) the challenge posed by English pirates to Europe’s dominant imperial power, Spain, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; (2) the threat made by these same pirates to the emerging British Empire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and (3) the successful efforts of the British state to exert control over the Atlantic through state-sponsored forms of piracy, privateers and press gangs, in the eighteenth century. The British established naval supremacy and consolidated imperial control over the Atlantic by monopolizing the same violent methods once used by pirates.

Representing Transnational Law: Drone Warfare and Transnational Legal Text

2021 ◽  
pp. 1068-1090
Author(s):  
Jothie Rajah
Keyword(s):  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Targeted Killing ◽  
Legal Text ◽  
Transnational Law ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Drone Warfare ◽  
British State ◽  
Fictional Representations

What can entertainment media tell us about a contemporary concept of law that is being transnationalized, and why should scholars pay attention to ostensibly fictional representations of law in transnational contexts? In this chapter, I consider representations of transnational law through an analysis of Gavin Hood’s 2016 film on drone warfare, Eye in the Sky (Eye). Eye is driven by a compelling narrative tension: a child is likely to be harmed if a missile is launched at a room occupied by terrorists loading suicide vests with explosives. But if this child is not risked (sacrificed?) and the terrorists conduct their suicide mission, a minimum of eighty civilian deaths is the probable result. With lives at stake, we watch a transnational alliance of American and British state actors debate law, the rules governing drone strikes, and accountability to publics, as the decision is made to conduct the targeted killing. Dramatizing questions of law in relation to the secretive workings of drone warfare, Eye offers a valuable representation of how a very specific account of law as security is being transnationalized.

Refabricating the Imperial Image on the Isle of Dogs: Modernist Design, British State Exhibitions and Colonial Policy 1924–1951

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 317-348
Author(s):  
Rhodri Windsor Liscombe
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Town Planning ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Colonial Policy ◽  
International Expositions ◽  
Festival Of Britain ◽  
British State

Historical analysis of the 1951 Festival of Britain has tended to overlook its ideological genealogy, and also to give less consideration to the Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research at Lansbury in Poplar on the Isle of Dogs than to the architecture and displays at the South Bank site (Figs 1 and 2). That genealogy reflects an intersection between the formulation of colonial policy and the adaptation of Modern Movement theory and practice during the final phase of British imperialism. Consequently the purpose of this paper is to recover various aspects of this intersection, during the nearly three decades from the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. Focusing on design practice in the Empire, especially the national exhibition buildings erected at those major international expositions that led up to and culminated in the Festival of Britain, it also examines the wider representation of architectural and colonial development in professional media and public propaganda.

The Resurgence of Colonial Anglicanism: the Colonial Bishoprics Fund, 1840–1

2008 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 196-213
Author(s):  
Rowan Strong
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Local Leadership ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Institutional Dimension ◽  
British State ◽  
The Church

Revival and resurgence is not simply something that happens to individuals or groups of persons; it is a phenomenon that, takes place within organized communities, institutions, and societies. The Church has existed in history as an organized society of believers, and this institutional dimension of Christianity has frequently shaped Christian history and the influence of Christianity on wider society for better and worse. Indeed, it could be argued that this is the dimension of Christianity which has been most influential historically. However, in the case of the Church of England in the British Empire its organized influence as a Church was seriously curtailed by its restricted and partial institutional existence throughout the eighteenth century in the North American colonies. There it existed without a bishop to provide local leadership and an effective counterweight to local lay elites. When that situation reversed and the British state began to support colonial bishoprics after the loss of the thirteen colonies in the new United States of America, the Church of England remained largely at the mercy of fluctuating political agendas to supply colonial bishops with sufficient legality and infrastructure. However, in the early 1840s the Church of England underwent a resurgence in the British Empire as a consequence of developing a new response to its metropolitan political situation, which initiated a revival in its colonial engagement.

Britannia's Auxiliaries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Conway
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Financial Investments ◽  
British Case ◽  
British State ◽  
Extensive Involvement

This book provides the first wide-ranging attempt to consider the continental European contribution to the eighteenth-century British Empire. The British benefited from many different European inputs—financial, material, and, perhaps most importantly, human. Continental Europeans appeared in different British imperial sites as soldiers, settlers, scientists, sailors, clergymen, merchants, and technical experts. They also sustained the empire from without—through their financial investments, their consumption of British imperial goods, their supply of European products, and by aiding British imperial communication. Continental Europeans even provided Britons with social support from their own imperial bases. Britannia’s Auxiliaries explores the means by which continental Europeans came to play a part in British imperial activity, at a time when, at least in theory, overseas empires were meant to be exclusionary structures, intended to serve national purposes. It looks at the ambitions of the continental Europeans themselves, and at the encouragement given to their participation both by private interests in the British Empire and by the British state. Despite the extensive involvement of continental Europeans, the empire remained essentially British. Indeed, the empire seems to have changed the Europeans who entered it more than they changed the empire. This study, then, qualifies recent scholarly emphasis on the transnational forces that undermined the efforts of imperial authorities to maintain control of their empires. In the British case, the state seems, for the most part, to have managed the process of continental involvement in ways that furthered British interests.

‘Millions of Eyes Were Turned Skywards’: The Air League of the British Empire, Empire Air Day, and the Promotion of Air-mindedness, 1934–9

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan G E Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Technological Change ◽  
British Empire ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
Military Strength ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
British State ◽  
The Military ◽  
Large Sections

Abstract This article investigates the Air League of the British Empire and its attempts to promote air-mindedness within British society in the late 1930s. It draws attention to the Air League’s construction of a distinctly militarized aerial theatre—in the form of Empire Air Day (EAD)—and highlights the extent to which the event was embedded in popular civic ritual. Linking the themes of nation, empire, youth, and air-mindedness, the case of EAD provides important insights into the ways in which British society interacted with—and ascribed meaning to—technology, technological change, and modernity, in a period of high international tensions. The article shows that the Air Ministry valued the display as a vehicle for recruitment, propaganda, and as a way to project an image of military strength to domestic and foreign audiences. The display enabled the League to place before the British public a form of ‘popular’ militarism that was supported by large sections of British society, key military figures, members of the royal family, newspapers across the political spectrum, and by politicians of all stripes. EAD was a politically and culturally acceptable way of promoting rearmament and the military capabilities of the British state.

scholarly journals THE STATE AND THE ASSASSINATION THREAT IN BRITAIN, 1971–1984

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 241-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON BALL
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
International System ◽  
The State ◽  
Major Site ◽  
The Past ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
British State

AbstractThe emergence of London as a major site of political murder caught the British state by surprise in the early 1970s. Assumptions about assassination – as an event linked to the British empire – built up over seven decades – had to be abandoned in under a decade. The change in Britain's understanding of its vulnerability within the international system was traumatic. This change took place in three stages, beginning in 1971, 1978, and 1984. There were strong elements of continuity between the Callaghan government and the first Thatcher government. It was the second Thatcher government that made a more radical break with the past. A new understanding of assassination conspiracies altered fundamentally the state's approach to security.

The First British Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 884-908
Author(s):  
Nicholas Canny
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Diverse Populations ◽  
British State ◽  
Atlantic Empire

As this chapter traces the development of Britain’s Atlantic Empire, it shows how the authority of what was originally an English state began to rely upon support from the ever-more diverse populations coming under British control. While Scots were the only ones to achieve equality with English people, initially in the Ulster Plantation and later, following the Act of Union of 1707, throughout Britain’s overseas empire, the chapter shows that many of the Protestant and Catholic populations of Ireland also prospered from, and served, the empire, and that many Native Americans and African American slaves were enlisted to serve its cause at moments of crisis. The chapter also addresses the extent to which the governance of the British state and empire was managed by people from military backgrounds, which is unsurprising given Britain’s successive military engagements in Ireland, in Continental Europe and, latterly, in defending its empire.

Vive Dessalines!

2021 ◽  
pp. 189-226
Author(s):  
Jack Daniel Webb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
National Sovereignty ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
State Actors ◽  
British State

Chapter Four interrogates British reactions to Haitian performances and demonstrations of national sovereignty at the beginning of the twentieth century. As the chapter explores, Haitians performed and enforced their sovereignty through the celebration of the centenary of independence, through exercising their rights to act on the international stage in the capacity of diplomats, and through adopting new citizens. To many elite British observers, who were concerned with the expansion of democracy in Britain, Haiti presented an excessively democratic state, populated and governed over by a lower-class of people. Such a view was challenged and made complicated in British interactions with Haitians. Ideas about Haiti were, this chapter illustrates, paradoxical as British state actors conversed with and respected the authority of their Haitian counterparts in some respects, while simultaneously arguing that Haitians lacked the credentials for government.

Governance through Documents: The Board of Trade, Its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-290
Author(s):  
Asheesh Kapur Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
British Atlantic World ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
British State

AbstractThis article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use of archives that the board sought to enforce constitutional norms of bureaucratic conduct and the authority of central institutions of imperial administration. In the absence of a singular, codified written constitution, the British state relied upon a variety of different kinds of documents to forge the imperial Atlantic into a governed space. The article concludes by pointing to the continuing centrality of documents and archives to the bureaucratic manifestation of the imperial constitution in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

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