Red Coats and Wild Birds across the British Empire

2020 ◽  
pp. 10-22
Author(s):  
Kirsten A. Greer
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Animal Species ◽  
Wild Birds ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
British Military ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Military ◽  
Different Parts

Chapter 1 situates the contributions of British military officers to the development of field ornithology from the traces and material remnants of their bird collections and specimens housed in museums across the British Empire, especially in Britain. Untangling the avian imperial archive explores how transimperial careers can be written using not only textual sources (e.g., biographies and personal correspondence) but also traces and artifacts of material culture, specifically bird skins as part of the avian imperial archive. By unraveling the avian imperial archive, the contributions of British military officers to the emergence of the field of zoogeography—a branch of biogeography concerned with the distribution of animal species across the globe—are put into sharp relief, illustrating the multiple avian-human entanglements in different parts of the British Empire, including in the Mediterranean. As both a fantasy of empire and a reflection of transient lives, avian scientific specimens in historical geographic research enrich our understanding of the intersections between science, empire, and the military.

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.

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.

Pageantry, Pioneers, Panics and Punitive Expeditions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dominy
Keyword(s):  
African Population ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Military ◽  
The Military ◽  
The Prestige

This chapter examines the role of the garrison in the British Empire's establishment of a colonial state in Natal during the period 1840s–1860s. It first explains how the garrison transformed Pietermaritzburg from a Trekker settlement to a Victorian colonial capital before considering the ways in which the British Crown used pageantry and propaganda to reinforce the prestige of the colonial state while masking the military weakness of the garrison in relation to the colony's potential enemies. It then discusses the garrison's “punitive expeditions”—almost as an extension of the parading on the barrack square of Fort Napier—in response to panic and rumors of invasions. Ironically, those raids provoked “panics” among the African population; such panics fed the almost pathological fear that the settlers had of a “native” rising or “combination.” The chapter also looks at the appointment of British military officers in various civil posts in the colony and concludes with an assessment of the Zulu invasion scare of 1861 and the question that it raised regarding payment for the garrison.

Thomas Wright Blakiston

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-40
Author(s):  
Kirsten A. Greer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mediterranean Region ◽  
Military Culture ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
British Military ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Military ◽  
At Home

Chapter 2 examines the production of the scientific war hero in British military culture in the mid-nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the Crimean War (1853–56) as an important event in securing Britain’s ascendency over Russian aspirations in the Mediterranean region, and in the emergence of the military-scientific hero. The chapter also highlights the military-scientific hero as a product of conducting fieldwork in the Crimean theater of war and collecting specimens as scientific trophies of war for a British audience at home. Here, the focus is on Ordnance officer Captain Thomas Wright Blakiston, Royal Artillery, who collected numerous birds while serving with his regiments, published works in the Zoologist, and sent specimens to British museums, including the Museum of the Royal Artillery Institution at Woolwich.

Philip Savile Grey Reid

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-96
Author(s):  
Kirsten A. Greer
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Military Culture ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
The West ◽  
British North America ◽  
British Military ◽  
America South

Chapter 5 investigates how, back “home” in Britain, British military officers’ production of ornithological knowledge in the British Mediterranean helped reformulate notions of nation and “British birds.” It focuses on Captain Philip Savile Grey Reid (1845–1915), Royal Engineers, as a homeward-bound officer to Aldershot, Hampshire, to understand how ideas and practices of ornithology circulated back to Britain. Designated as “home of the British Army,” Aldershot was an integral site in the transimperial network of military garrisons across the British Empire, connecting England to the Mediterranean, India, British North America, South Africa, and the West Indies. The home station became an important posting for the reunion of family, friendship, military, and ornithological networks in England; its location in Hampshire allowed imperial military officers to ramble in the English countryside, fostering temperate cultures of nature through proper conduct in the collecting and documenting of British birds. Central to this chapter is an understanding of transimperial processes in the shaping of British military culture and the designation of national birds.

Andrew Leith Adams

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Kirsten A. Greer
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New Brunswick ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Military Career ◽  
British North America ◽  
Northern India ◽  
British Military ◽  
Medical Career ◽  
The Military

Set in Malta, chapter 3 follows the military medical career of Andrew Leith Adams, military surgeon with the Twenty-Second Regiment of Foot, whose military and scientific networks and travels to northern India, Malta, Egypt, and New Brunswick, British North America, helped him to conceive ideas of tropicality, semitropicality, and the temperate. To Adams, temperate martial masculinity was both a physical and mental state and a climatic zone important in the maintenance of a British military career across the British Empire. His ornithological investigations also allowed him to contemplate the zoological connectivity between Europe and North Africa.

scholarly journals Fascist Yogis: Martial Bodies and Imperial Impotence

2016 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Imy
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Universal Model ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
British Military ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
Second World

AbstractBetween the First and Second World Wars, two retired British military officers, Francis Yeats-Brown and J. F. C. Fuller, embraced fascism and yoga. In their publications and lecture tours, they used their past experiences as soldiers in India to encourage strength, discipline, and virility. While Fuller believed that yoga could teach men to be strong and powerful leaders, Yeats-Brown celebrated yoga as a part of “Aryan” racial inheritance. This article examines both Fuller's and Yeats-Brown's published accounts and archival trails in order to understand the development of global masculinities within individual British lives. It reveals that their engagement with yoga was a defensive effort to appropriate the “regeneration” of martial masculinity encouraged by Indian nationalists. Claiming yoga for “great men” and “Aryan” audiences became a way to rewrite their own histories of service to the British Empire. They erased the weakness and fragility of imperial life, and replaced it with idealized bodies that were strong, disciplined, and virile. In so doing, they attempted to save imperial soldiers from political and cultural irrelevance. This reimagining used imperial hierarchies of gender and racial difference to encourage a “universal” model of martial masculinity that could restore the power of the British Empire.

Cartography and Conflict: The Board of Ordnance and the Construction of the Military Landscape of Scotland, 1689–1815

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn J. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Tower Of London ◽  
British Military ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
Transportation Development ◽  
The Military

Scotland generated four Jacobite risings from 1689 to 1745, plus Franco-Jacobite invasion threats in 1708 and 1744. British military mapping was the responsibility of the London-based Board of Ordnance. After the 1707 Act of Union the Scottish Ordnance Office came under London control and received additional staff. Road making was initiated, associated with Generals George Wade and William Roy. Originally fortress-oriented, the Drawing Room in the Tower of London shifted to producing topographical surveys, oriented after 1746 towards transportation, development and integration.

Crossing the Pomerium

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Koortbojian
Keyword(s):  
Social Practices ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Religion And Law ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Military ◽  
The City

The ancient Romans famously distinguished between civic life in Rome and military matters outside the city—a division marked by the pomerium, an abstract religious and legal boundary that was central to the myth of the city's foundation. This book explores, by means of images and texts, how the Romans used social practices and public monuments to assert their capital's distinction from its growing empire, to delimit the proper realms of religion and law from those of war and conquest, and to establish and disseminate so many fundamental Roman institutions across three centuries of imperial rule. The book probes such topics as the appearance in the city of Romans in armor, whether in representation or in life, the role of religious rites on the battlefield, and the military image of Constantine on the arch built in his name. Throughout, the book reveals how, in these instances and others, the ancient ideology of crossing the pomerium reflects the efforts of Romans not only to live up to the ideals they had inherited, but also to reconceive their past and to validate contemporary practices during a time when Rome enjoyed growing dominance in the Mediterranean world. The book explores a problem faced by generations of Romans—how to leave and return to hallowed city ground in the course of building an empire.

Diachronic trends in the evolution of civilizations in the Nile valley

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-49
Author(s):  
Элеонора Кормышева ◽  
Eleonora Kormysheva
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social History ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The Mediterranean

The diachronic trends in socio-economic and cultural development of the societies in the Nile valley are revealed based on the materials from Giza necropolis (the 3rd millennium BC) and the settlement of Abu Erteila (1st century AD). The research made it possible to trace the typological similarities in the evolution of the studied societies in cultural and historical contexts. The main fields of the research were epigraphy, iconography, social history, and material culture. Many previously unknown monuments discovered by Russian archaeologists in Egypt and Sudan were introduced into scientific discourse. The basis was created for studying the Nile valley as a contact zone between the Mediterranean world and Africa.

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