British naval assistance at the twilight of empire: The case of Abu Dhabi, 1966–1968

Britain long sought to establish, develop and utilise local military capabilities across its empire. In its informal empire among the Arab Gulf Sheikhdoms of Eastern Arabia, Britain increasingly encouraged – and often cajoled – its protégés to build up their own security forces as London's moment in the Middle East was coming to an end. The scholarly literature on imperial assistance to local forces is invariably army-centric; little attention is given to how powers such as Britain helped establish local naval forces. This article seeks to address this imbalance by describing how British naval institutions supported the establishment of the local naval force in Abu Dhabi in the years immediately before British withdrawal from the region in 1971. This case study expands the historiography of British military assistance to cover naval forces and describes the repertoire of support provided by the Royal Navy and Navy Department.

殖民的規訓營造──廈門租界的個案（1840s~1940s）

<p>本文旨在重新檢視19世紀中葉後，廈門租界在通商口岸的建構下，如何以殖民工程科學論述的移植，進行租界的空間營造。文中將指出這樣的殖民行動目的在於確保殖民者在殖民地的衛生與安全，以確保殖民行動的遂行，方式上是經由科學觀察、調查、測量和統計的殖民現代性營造，一種帶有非正式帝國（informal empire）領土延伸的具體空間部署。這種非正式的殖民營造，是一種主體被遮蔽的建構過程。作者認為，19世紀萌芽的科學且正當的社會進化理論，提供了像英國這樣的殖民帝國在晚清中國租界擴張的一個自然化邏輯的依據；同時，藉由知識掌控，進而利用殖民地資源，以增進各種帝國殖民行動的經濟利益。這種來自於殖民主義擴張所確立的空間部署，使得想像中的地理願望在這一部署行動中被化為確立的政治連結、經濟依賴與地景改造的物質空間性。諸如廈門租界也在這種全景敞視論（panopticism）的機制下，而被予以殖民規訓營造。</p> <p>&nbsp;</p><p> This article would like to rediscover the spatial planning and management of the treaty area in Xiamen（廈門）during the 1840s~1930s. It argues that the Xiamen concession shaped the treaty port by transplanting the modern engineering-science. The author thought that British Empire used the neutralization logic for science and legitimated the social evolution to encroach concessions of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century, and enhanced various interests of colonial acts by controlling knowledge simultaneously. This spatial disposition made geographical desire of colonial imagination be a physical space of political connection and economical dependency and remodeled. The informal colonization was a constructional process of a hidden subject. The Xiamen concession built the colonial discipline based on the method of panopticism. This article will point out the purpose of colonial act aimed on ensuring the hygiene and health of Colonizers in Xiamen concession. In practice, it concerned building colonial modernity by observing, surveying, measuring the statistics of science that was a spatial disposition referring to extended territory of informal empire.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>

Securing the Levantine Empire

The chapter traces the struggle of British military authorities to secure their grip over the cities they occupied. New legal measures and security institutions were developed to combat the challenges emanating from the permeable, connected character of the Levantine city. Martial law and military police forces, however, proved insufficient to suppress anti-imperial movements, while their institutionalisation advanced the militarizing, anglicizing tendencies of military rule that further alienated local partners who were relied on for the functioning of this informal empire. The chapter shows how escalating urban and extra-urban violence resulted in the major retrenchment and retreat of British military forces in 1922 and 1923, bringing to an end the distinct Levantine empire that had bound these cities together over the preceding years

Greece, Uruguay and the British Informal Empire: From National Narratives to Global History

This article adopts a comparative global history approach to reflect on the histories of Greece and Uruguay through the prism of British informal imperial rule. It compares and contrasts the role and impact of the British informal empire on Greece and Uruguay’s economic integration into the globalising economy of the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is twofold: to reflect on each country’s past to gain a better understanding of them, and to integrate the histories of Greece and Uruguay into the history of globalisation. To achieve this, we examine the place of each country in the globalising economy and the reasons why each country “performed” differently; Uruguay experienced some of the highest living standards in the region and the world while Greece was mired in wars and aggressive nationalist policies that lead to significant territorial (and therefore market) expansion at significant cost to state finances – a history that was marked by economic failures such as the default of 1893. Even that crisis, however, produced different outcomes depending on each country’s place in the globalising British informal empire. This article shows two different paths of integration into a globalising economy shaped by the British financial and commercial order – an order often imposed with consent and occasionally through coercion.

Baumwolle, Elfenbein und Glasperlen. Perspektiven österreichischer Reisender auf die Errichtung eines „informal empire“ im Sudan des 19. Jahrhunderts

Cotton, Ivory and Glass Beads. Perspectives of Austrian Travellers on the Establishment of an "Informal Empire" in 19th Century SudanThe following article examines travel accounts of explorers, travellers and officials close to the Habsburg Monarchy. It focusses on the economic aspects of the 19th century Austrian presence in Sudan. As will be shown, several Austrians attempted to engage in local trade in ways that sought to establish an "informal empire".