Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982

In 1893, a group of colonial officials from thirteen countries abandoned their imperial rivalry and established the International Colonial Institute (ICI), which became the world's most important colonial think tank of the twentieth century. Through the lens of the ICI, Florian Wagner argues that this international cooperation reshaped colonialism as a transimperial and governmental policy. The book demonstrates that the ICI's strategy of using indigenous institutions and customary laws to encourage colonial development served to maintain colonial rule even beyond the official end of empires. By selectively choosing loyalists among the colonized to participate in the ICI, it increased their autonomy while equally delegitimizing more radical claims for independence. The book presents a detailed study of the ICI's creation, the transcolonial activities of its prominent members, its interactions with the League of Nations and fascist governments, and its role in laying the groundwork for the structural and discursive dependence of the Global South after 1945.

‘Sailing on the same uncertain sea’

Although they were small, the islands of the Caribbean were central rather than peripheral to the idea of empire. By the seventeenth century, the islands of the Antillean archipelago were already integral to European imperial rivalry and—as a result—came to shape European notions of what empires were and what they were for. This chapter explores the shifting nature of these islands as they emerged to become imperial powerhouses in the eighteenth century. This transformation was set against the backdrop of the great upheavals of war and revolution. The shifting demography of the West Indies and their economic and strategic importance exposed them particularly to the threats created by the geopolitical maelstrom around them. This chapter argues that their island nature intensified how they were affected by, and responded to, the profound and unprecedented uncertainties of the Age of Revolutions.

Knowledge

Over the nineteenth century, imperial rivalry and fears over the security of India’s northern borders led to the steady accumulation of knowledge about caravan trade and the trading world. This chapter shows that the Indo-Afghan frontier and central Asia were of critical significance to the testing of scientific mapping and modern intelligence, ethnography and genealogy, making the spaces and networks of caravan trade fundamental to the finessing of the British Indian state’s technologies of power. Yet, the epistemic anxiety resulting from information asymmetry and the flows of mobile agents through this space—especially during the ‘Great Game’—precipitated schemes to sedentarise populations and transform them into cultivators and soldiers, in turn integrating western Punjab’s economy more deeply into that of the British Empire at the cost of connections into the Eurasian interior.

A Cherokee Envoy and the Portrait That Failed

The focus of this chapter alternates throughout from Ostenaco and his travels to the centre of London, to Reynolds’s endeavour to paint his portrait, back to Ostenaco, back to Reynolds, and then finally ends with Ostenaco’s voyage home in October 1762. The chapter covers only six months, but this period turned out to be portentous for both Cherokee and British fortunes. The Cherokees looked set to enjoy some assured independence herein and the British teetered on the verge of wiping out all imperial rivalry. Amid the narrative flipping, we follow Ostenaco’s adventures through the seamier regions of London’s lowlife—including taverns, spas, and drunken escapades in pleasure gardens—to his diplomatic meeting with King George III. We witness Reynolds’s meeting with Ostenaco and his attempt to capture the Cherokee’s image on canvas according to his neoclassical philosophy of art. Reynolds afterwards reckoned the work a failure—an intriguingly rare moment of defeat for the painter—but it nonetheless distils much about attitudes to empire in Britain at the time.

‘The only safe haven of refuge in all the world’: Paris, Indian ‘revolutionaries’ and imperial rivalry, c. 1905–40

Focusing on British Indian subjects who travelled to France in the early twentieth century and who resided in Paris, this article argues that these migrants occupied a position that was simultaneously privileged and invidious. It urges that closer attention be paid to the group for two reasons. First, British Indians in Paris were able to negotiate contentious and potentially hazardous political situations according to context and audience, sometimes mobilising their status as British subjects as a means of achieving limited preferential treatment from the French state, at other times making use of a certain conception of Frenchness to garner support among socialist and anti-imperial movements. Second, the policing of the group reveals collaboration and competition between imperial nation-states and between different anti-colonial movements, analysis of which can nuance the growing body of historical research on the policing of foreigners and colonial subjects in Europe.

Imperial Rivalry

How did nations justify their claim to territories they were not occupying? As the windiest, coldest, and driest continent on the planet, Antarctica poses great challenges for nations that aspire to own part or all of it. Most of the continent is covered by an...