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Elite schools in the UK are bound to the history of British colonialism. This paper examines the material ties between these schools and the transatlantic slave trade. We combine multiple sources to examine which schools and their alumni accrued substantial economic capital derived from the enslavement of Black people. We find two principal connections: first, in donations and foundations of schools from those who made their fortune in the slave trade; and second, through income of boys attending these schools. Drawing on the Legacies of British Slavery dataset, we show that schools with alumni benefitting from the slave trade include the most prestigious British private schools. Moreover, this paper traces the histories of several secondary schools founded by, or in receipt of, substantial donations from slave-owning families. We argue that extractive, violent forms of colonial capital accumulation have been central to, the formation and maintenance of these elite educational institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of Iraq's emergence as a state in the context of the First World War with a special focus on the interplay between British imperialism and Shiʿi activism. By the twentieth century, the majority of people who lived in the territory that would become the Iraqi state were Shiʿi Muslims. Largely ignoring the activism of Iraqis, there is a line of thinking in English-language scholarship which suggests that the process of state formation in Iraq was completely driven by British imperialists. Indeed, Britain established a military presence in the Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul during and after the First World War, and the empire was awarded an internationally sanctioned mandate for this territory in 1920. In an effort to decolonize the history of Iraq, this paper argues that the inhabitants of Iraq, especially Shiʿi activists, played a significant role in the formation of the new state. Research for this paper is based on the writings of Shiʿi activists with a special focus on clerical leaders, as well as British government officials. Challenging historical accounts that reflect British imperialist narratives, this paper argues that Shiʿi activists (and British responses to them) significantly influenced the course of state formation in Iraq. This is not to say that Britain was not influential in the creation of Iraq; in fact, British imperialists clearly had the upper hand. However, they did not operate in a vacuum, unaffected by the inhabitants of the Iraqi state that they wished to create. Instead of assuming that British imperialists single-handedly created Iraq or that ethno-sectarian divisions are the natural order in Iraq, this paper suggests that the relationship between Britain and Shiʿism played a critical role in the formation of the Iraqi state. Although many scholars consider Islamic sectarianism and Britain's colonial legacy in Iraq to be at the heart of the country's socio-political system, the relationship between Britain and Shiʿism in Iraq has not received ample scholarly attention. The intersection of British imperialism and Shiʿi activism resulted in several foundational threads that were woven into the fabric of the Iraqi state. The 1920 Shiʿi revolt against the British mandate for Iraq and the British counter-revolt became the outward manifestation of the British-Shiʿi divide. British officials installed a Sunni-run government in Iraq for fear of Shiʿi dominance, which could have resulted from democratic institutions. Anti-British resistance led by Shiʿi clerics completely changed the calculus of Iraq's emergence as an independent state and alienated much of the Shiʿi community from Iraq's political establishment. This process radically altered the roles that Shiʿi and British leaders hoped to play in post-Ottoman Iraq. This state of affairs was not inevitable given that the continuation of British-Shiʿi alliances that began to emerge during the First World War would have produced a profoundly different state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Global North, mass warfare created a huge demand for social protection, pushing governments to provide income for invalids, war victims, and the survivors of fallen soldiers. Most European colonial powers, including France and Great Britain, recruited soldiers and other security forces not only from their metropoles but also from their colonies during both World Wars. However, the question of how mass warfare influenced social reforms in former colonies has not been systematically addressed, particularly with respect to how these influences varied across colonial powers. To begin to address this gap, this paper explores the warfare–welfare nexus in the context of British and French colonies of West Africa around World War I (WWI). The paper finds that, while Britain and France had similar overarching imperial and military objectives in West Africa of securing their colonies, enforcing order within them, and promoting commerce to increase profit, they went about achieving them very differently, with direct and indirect implications for social reforms after WWI. While only a first step, research on the distinct nature of the warfare–welfare nexus in colonial contexts is critical in order to historicize and close research gaps by widening and deepening our understanding of social policy trajectories in countries of the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a novel interpretation of the 1890 British Ultimatum, by bringing to the front of the stage its techno-diplomatic dimension, often invisible in the canonical diplomatic and military narratives. Furthermore, we use an unconventional historical source to grasp the British–Portuguese imperial conflict over the African hinterland via the building of railways: the cartoons of the politically committed and polyvalent Portuguese artist and journalist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro (1846–1905), published in his journal Ponto nos iis , from the end of 1889 and throughout 1890. We argue that the Ponto nos iis cartoons played a so far overlooked role in the unfolding of British–Portuguese affairs, as they shaped at a distance a diplomatic exchange with the British satirical journal Punch. Attacking and counterattacking his fellow cartoonists in Britain, Pinheiro surged into the role of informal diplomat. This cartoon visual and public diplomacy unfolded in the pages of both journals and was tied to the two countries' colonial conquests in Africa, where the Portuguese and British empires were competing to dominate the African hinterland through large technological systems. Hence the cartoons made visible to wider audiences the otherwise hidden role that technologies played in the two countries' affairs. In turn, the cartoons aimed at persuading the Portuguese public and ruling classes alike that only regime change, from monarchic to republican, would restore the wounded Portuguese national pride. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Edwardian public schools' relations with Empire. It does so by focusing on their students' perceptions of the imperial enterprise and participation in Empire-relevant schemes. For, current scholarship has, almost without exception and in-depth investigation, presumed the Empire's popularity and pre-eminence within such institutions. However, this paper, drawing on new archival research and Eton College source material, argues a strong anti-Empire minority was present among public school students. Likewise, it suggests various imperial schemes and institutions, impacting public schools, met significant student detachment or subversion. These conclusions, then, inform and enhance the historiography of British imperialism. In particular, they indicate that Edwardian imperialist propaganda was, in the public school case, unable to entrench a ubiquitous, pro-Empire ideology. Moreover, Britain's upper and upper-middle classes, as embodied by Edwardian public school students, comprised not only reluctant or 'secondary' imperialists, but also multiple anti-Empire advocates. Therefore, this presents Edwardian British society's Empire-engagement as much more amorphous and fragmentary than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the demobilization of Northern Rhodesian (Zambian) servicemen after the First World War. Tied to this, is the compensation and commemoration of the askari (soldiers) and mtenga-tenga (porters) who died in the war. The compensation of ex-servicemen was a drawn-out process which took several years, eventually coming to a halt in 1928 with many Africans forfeiting their dues. The British South Africa Company (BSAC) and the British Colonial Government did not erect individual tombstones to commemorate ex-servicemen. The partiality exhibited in commemoration and compensation processes, based on racial lines, did not reflect the enormous contributions which these Africans made to the Allied war effort. The main sources for this article are official government records stored in the National Archives of Zambia, and records of the Catholic White Father missionaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the 1745–46 Jacobite rebellion in Scotland (the last major attempt to restore the Stuart dynasty – in exile since 1689 – to the throne of Britain), and its decades-long aftermath, as a transatlantic problem deeply embedded in the geopolitical and cultural entanglements of inter-imperial rivalry and warfare. Prevailing interpretations of the '45 consider it as primarily a culminating political event centred on dynastic rivalry and the relative security of the Hanoverian establishment, while overlooking more recent geographic insights from the fields Atlantic and New Imperial history. In exploring the long term imperial strategic repercussions of the '45 as understood through the dynamics of a rapidly expanding and interconnected British Atlantic press and public sphere, this paper demonstrates novel and lasting understandings of the connection between inter-imperial rivalry, warfare, and domestic fifth-column rebellions. Such understandings, continuing throughout the mid-eighteenth century wars between Britain and France, and the contemporary anxieties tied to them, disrupt linear narratives of post-'45 British political and cultural integration. The British polity and formations of Britishness and Scottishness were entangled with France to an unprecedented degree as a result of the inter-imperial problem of the '45. This ultimately draws attention to the overlooked historical novelties, continuities, and contingencies of the post-'45 period. This cultural context must be considered and periodized on its own historical terms, rather than as part of a straightforward eighteenth century process of nation-state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid nineteenth into the mid twentieth centuries a significant number of British people spent their careers in India administering what was regarded as the most important territory of the British Empire. During this period, an extensive body of literature on Indian wildlife was published both in Britain and in India itself. This paper surveys the authors and the publishers of this literature and suggests that the material was shaped by the differing interests of readers in the two countries. The emergence of a community of enthusiastic naturalists among the British expatriates is contrasted with the promotion of India as an exotic location for readers in Britain itself. The role of hunting narratives in providing information for the study of natural history is explored, along with growing concerns about the need for conservation. The complexity of the relationships between expatriate British naturalists and the local populations is used to throw light on how the situation changed in the decades leading to independence. In conclusion, the publications of the Bombay Natural History Society are used to illustrate these developments [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghanistan is the country in the world with the most SALW (small arms and light weapons). Contrary to what is usually assumed, the proliferation of modern firearms in the country did not start in the 1980s, but at the end of the 19th century, when Pashtun tribes acquired modern rifles and ammunition through a variety of means, mostly through smuggling. The paper investigates the illegal arms trade from the Gulf to the north-western Indian Frontier, an area of crucial importance for British imperial strategists and the Government of India, at a time of great power rivalry and a relative decline of Britain's global influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better grasp the significance of the curse in Robert Southey's The Curse of Kehama (1810), we should begin by asking why, nearly twenty years after the poem was first published, Southey found occasion to return to his "Hindoo romance" in his sweeping commentary on nineteenth-century British society, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829). Despite the long gap, the intertextuality of these works shows the inextricability of Southey's political, economic, and religious thought. In this article, I argue that Kehama 's investment in the conversion of colonial subjects, in fact, extends to the underlying global economy of debt driving the early British empire. As the poem reveals, maintaining the convertibility of paper currencies in circulation to a single gold standard was, for Southey, essential to the preservation of spiritual standards as Britain's economy went global and increasingly faced the curse of debt. Drawing on the new imperial history, this article makes explicit the economic relations behind Romantic literature and imperial culture by exposing the connections between economic debt and literature within the circuits of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neither the idea that Britain 'stood alone' in 1940, nor that the British war was a 'people's war', were at all common during the Second World War. If anything was thought to be 'alone', it was the empire, though the more common view was that the empire always had allies. 'People's war' was a rare synonym for 'total war' and was sometimes used in an internationalist sense of a war of many peoples, and as the sort of war Britain should be, but was not, fighting. However, from 1945 a national 'alone' came into usage, for example by Churchill; but only from the 1960s was it a commonplace in history books. 'People's war' became more widely used in histories written in the 1960s, which defined it in a national progressive sense, although the term did not become common until the 1990s. Both ideas were essentially the creations of historians, who nationalised the history of what was an imperial and internationalist war, often turning it into a radically different domestic story focused on a national Home Front (ignoring the many imperial home fronts), a story which marginalised the military, foreign and political history of the war, and indeed the social history of the military as well. Historians later assumed that 'alone' and 'people's war' represented wartime nationalist ideologies, and wrote about them critically. Yet until recently they did not recognise that it was the very particular nature of the histories written in the 1960s which had generated these terms, and which embodied very particular analyses of British history and of the Second World War. The paper ends by arguing that much greater understanding is needed of the core assumptions which lie beneath the historiography of twentieth-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]