Anglospheres: Empire Redivivus?

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Union

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.

John Robert Seeley and the Political Theology of Empire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Famous Book ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.

Porfirian Commercial Propaganda: Mexico in the World Industrial Expositions

1977 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gene Yeager
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin American ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Latin American Countries ◽  
Trade And Investment

Students of late nineteenth century history have long dismissed the world industrial expositions as glittering, but not highly significant reflections of the gilded age. What emerges from the literature of the period, however, is a sense of the overriding commercial importance of these exhibitions. Nineteenth-century observers consistently linked the fairs to the general growth of world trade and to the expanding commercial hegemony of the United States. More specifically, contemporaries agreed that the expositions served to develop trade and investment ties with Latin America. Among the Latin American countries represented in the expositions, Mexico was the most important and consistent participant.

Art and civic culture in Birmingham in the late nineteenth century

Urban History ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Hartnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Consensus View ◽  
Municipal Reforms

This paper looks at Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham and claims that George Dawson's famous ‘civic gospel’ which laid the ground for the municipal reforms was permeated by a consensus view of the moral and civic role of art. It suggests that it was this combination of philosophy in action through art which created the special Birmingham context for a vibrant civic culture which led to the political and artistic achievements of the 1870s and 1880s. For a few brief years, this combination enabled Birmingham to stand above other British cities and lay claim to the titles of ‘the best-governed city in the world’ and ‘perhaps the most artistic town in England’.

Late Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Factor-Price Convergence: Were Heckscher and Ohlin Right?

1994 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 892-916 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin O'Rourke ◽  
Jeffrey G. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Market Integration ◽  
Commodity Prices ◽  
Commodity Price ◽  
The United States ◽  
Factor Price ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Price Convergence ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American

Due primarily to transport improvements, commodity prices in Britain and the United States tended to converge between 1870 and 1913. Heckscher and Ohlin, writing in 1919 and 1924, thought that these events should have contributed to factor-price convergence. It turns out that Heckscher and Ohlin were right: a significant share of the Anglo-American real-wage convergence was due to commodity-price convergence. It appears that this late nineteenth-century episode was the dramatic start of world-commodity and factor-market integration that continues today.

scholarly journals Historical Methodology and Writing the Liberian Past: the Case of Agriculture in the Nineteenth Century

2005 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Allen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Free Blacks ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Some of the late nineteenth century success of Liberia coffee, sugar, and other commodities can be attributed to the leasing of plantations to enterprising foreigners, although a few leading politicians did own successful farms … For most Americo-Liberians, the role of dirt farmer was decidedly beneath their station.Yet the reasons for this apathy among most Americo-Liberians for agriculture, which prevailed up to the early 1870s, were not far to seek. The majority of them being newly emancipated slaves, who had in servitude in America been used to being forced to work, erroneously equated their newly won freedom with abstinence from labour.Both arguments are inaccurate, yet the authors made essential contributions to the writing of Liberian history. J. Gus Liebenow became renowned within Liberian academic circles for his earlier book, Liberia: the Evolution of Privilege. In that book he analyzed the policy that enabled the minority Americo-Liberians (descendants of free blacks from the United States who founded Liberia in 1822), to monopolize political and economic power to the exclusion of the majority indigenous Africans for more than a century. M. B. Akpan dissected Liberia's dubious political history and concluded that Americo-Liberian authority over the indigenous population, was identical to the discriminatory and oppressive policy practiced by European colonizers in Africa.

A New Pablik: Abdul Halim Sharar, volunteerism, and the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam in late nineteenth-century India

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1049-1090 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. RYAN PERKINS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Effective Mass ◽  
Voluntary Association ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Mobilization ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth

AbstractIn the second half of the nineteenth century an increasing number of Indians entered the world of volunteerism and public activism. One such individual was the prolific Urdu writer Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926), who served as the secretary for a short-lived voluntary association, the Anjuman-e Dar-us-Salam, during the late 1880s in Lucknow, India. Using readers’ letters as printed in Sharar's widely circulating monthly periodical, Dil Gudāz, this article seeks to understand the reasons behind the increasing role of volunteerism as part and parcel of a modern sharīf Muslim identity in the post-1857 period. Having adopted the role of a community activist, Sharar began using his periodical, soon after its inception, to mobilize and recruit his readers to participate in what he described as a passionate movement sweeping through the ‘Islami pablik’. Both rhetorical and descriptive, such an idea provided hope for a divided and struggling community to overcome the divisions that were central to their many challenges in a post-1857 world. Through the study of the vicissitudes and challenges faced by Sharar and his fellow activists, this article underscores the ways in which public activism and volunteerism simultaneously represented the possibility for Muslims to use their own resources to bring about real social and political change, and also reminded them of their shortcomings and the limits of an informal activism. This article seeks to show that ultimately, even such ‘failed’ and ephemeral attempts were foundational for more effective mass mobilization efforts in the following decades and into the twentieth century.

scholarly journals India in the Rise of Britain and Europe: A Contribution to the Convergence and Great Divergence Debates

2020 ◽  
pp. 026010792090719
Author(s):  
Prabir Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Importance ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Divergence ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Atlantic Economy

This article discusses the role of the British control of India in the rise of Britain and Europe as well as in the convergence in incomes within the Atlantic economy in the late nineteenth century. Britain was at the apex of the world economy throughout most of the nineteenth century. The article argues that the emergence of Britain as the apex economic and political power depended on her control over India. This control of India then enabled Britain to pursue a set of policies that were of critical importance, both for the convergence in incomes within the Atlantic economy and the rise of Europe. The thesis advanced here can be viewed, depending on one’s prior position, as being either complementary to or alternative to the views of many of the protagonists of the divergence debate in the literature. JEL: N10, N13, N15, N70, O4

Engineering inter-imperialism: American miners and the transformation of global mining, 1871–1910

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Tuffnell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
South American ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
North And South

AbstractThis article examines the transnational circulation of American mine engineers between the United States, southern Africa, and the Americas in the late nineteenth century. Technology and knowledge was diffused worldwide with the circulation of American engineers who styled themselves as expert race managers as they compared the labour practices of mines across the world. The article's focus is the extension of the United States’ global footprint to South Africa, where an expatriate ‘colony’ of American engineers created a resilient form of Anglo-American inter-imperial collaboration. As they worked the Rand, American engineers made transnational comparisons of South African and North and South American mines. In the process, they led a global discussion of the efficiency of mining labour that reified white management of other races. After leaving the Rand, American engineers migrated across the globe, many to Mexico, where the interwoven networks of expert knowledge, industrial capitalism, and transnational race-making that characterized late nineteenth-century global mining followed.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

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