Search

Scholarly disagreements over the applicability of a colonial framework to Ireland's relationship with Britain have neglected how political actors perceived or used ideas about colonialism and imperialism. This article argues that how such ideas resonated and were used in the Northern Ireland 'Troubles' is as worthy of consideration as their validity. It examines how militant republicans conceived of Northern Ireland as having a colonial status and identified it as fitting into a broader pattern of decolonisation, seeking links with other anti-colonial forces outside Europe. It considers how a section of British politicians used the colonial framework to argue that British withdrawal was inevitable, viewing unionists as a settler community beyond the boundaries of Britishness. The dominant British discourse that opposed this framed self-determination differently, rejecting the utility of colonialism as an explanation of the dynamic of the conflict. When faced with charges of colonialism abroad, however, the rebuttal offered by those articulating this discourse had to be tailored to a suspicious international audience; the arguments available to British diplomats were narrowed by Britain's colonial past. To overcome this, the unionist cause was omitted and select Irish voices within constitutional nationalism were promoted. Colonial analogies and comparisons shaped overall thinking on Northern Ireland, whether they were valid or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the #Blacklivesmatter movement and its subsequent questioning of the European colonial past and the slave trade, this article seeks to shed light on what may be considered offensive memorabilia from the colonial past and discuss how to deal with them today. The 'decolonizing the minds' movement originated in 2015 in South Africa and culminated in 2020 with an attempt to bring down the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College in Oxford. This event demonstrated that those associated with oppression are increasingly ready to challenge the presence and symbolic locations of colonial and imperial relics. Similarly, colonial postcards are part and parcel of such heritage as they often convey and showcase the racist and sexist imperial gaze of the time. The question posed by this article is: how should we respond to that 'gaze' today? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ongoing debate surrounding the legacy of the British Empire, focusing on demands for the return of diamonds and gemstones that are part of the crown jewels. It provides specific examples, including the Cullinan II diamond in South Africa and the Koh-i-noor diamond in India. The article also discusses broader issues related to the colonial past, such as the removal of colonial symbols, repatriation of cultural artifacts, and the uncovering of forgotten histories. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the impact of colonialism on contemporary society and advocates for a multidisciplinary approach to decolonization and post-colonialism. Additionally, the article introduces a collection of nine articles that offer new perspectives on colonialism, imperialism, and the legacy of empire, exploring topics such as material legacies, memory management, and representation of colonized people in visual media. The collection aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of complex historical phenomena and examine the impact of colonialism on cultural and national identity. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the ways in which past colonial figures, who emerged against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century conquest of North Africa, still resonate and are celebrated in contemporary Algerian Francophone and Arabophone literatures. It questions the wider implications of these celebrations for post-colonial societies, and in particular the place of nostalgia and the wish to distinguish between the iniquities of colonialism as a system on the one hand, and the fortuitous but productive encounters involving those who challenged it from within, on the other. By contextualising the contemporary productions of Malika Mokeddem and Said Khatibi, this article demonstrates how these authors celebrate the many ways in which the non-conformist colonial figure of Isabelle Eberhardt sought freedom and rebelled against power tropes – particularly through the recourse to male disguise, whilst simultaneously appropriating and domesticating the Sahara Desert, its cultures and its populations. This article also examines how Yasmina Khadra celebrates French authors like Roger Frison-Roche and prominent colonial figures such as Charles de Foucauld. These literary works appear as significant examples of memory across different cultural settings, informing the challenge to, and inheritance of, the colonial tropes. Unexpectedly, figures such as that of Eberhardt appear, in the eyes of Algerian authors, as valid examples to emulate, in order to celebrate, reach, or at least imagine, emancipation in the aftermath of Algerian independence. This ultimately reveals hitherto ignored continuity between the colonial past and the postcolonial present that has nurtured the emergence of hybrid identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Empire has been politicised to an extent that many of us could never have predicted just a few years ago. The colonial past features especially prominently in the right wing-oriented press, where attempts to inform the public about the realities of colonialism are fiercely resisted in a 'culture war' against those labelled as 'woke'. This culture war is sponsored in part by elements within the post-Brexit Conservative government and its conservative-nationalist-populist counterparts in other countries. Some of those who pursue it have enthusiastically welcomed Nigel Biggar's Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning for giving the diminution and mitigation of British colonialism's violence and racism the appearance of intellectual credibility. This article explores the political and psychological dimensions of this phenomenon and provides a detailed critique of Biggar's book and its position within a historiography of imperial defensiveness. In the expectation that there are more culture war interpretations of the British Empire to come, I hope that it can act as something of a provisional guide for serious historians who are finding it increasingly difficult to avoid engagement with the contemporary politicisation of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relatively minor imprint Sweden had on the transatlantic slave trade has been seen as one of the consequences of Sweden being a 'failed empire'. This conception is misleading. By utilising a transimperial perspective on new research findings, the article shows that there was no lack of ambition among Swedish entrepreneurs in the context of the slave trade. The relative lack of Swedish slaving voyages rather had to do with specific circumstances such as Sweden's late entrance into the status of a colonial power, as well as patriotic politics in the wake of king Gustav III's death in 1792. By examining a range of case studies, specifically slaving voyages organised both from the Baltic and from Sweden's colony Saint-Barthélemy in the Caribbean, the historical record is clear that from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, there was an active Swedish engagement in the slave trade. Moreover, it was made possible by transimperial contacts and allowances. Reviewing this evidence, the article argues that all Swedish slaving voyages were complex and decentralised undertakings which were organised in spite of the lack of Swedish state policy, often with some form of foreign involvement, whether it consisted of mercantile networks, capital or knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1845 Dahra Massacre, in which French troops killed hundreds of Algerians by 'smoking out' their cave refuges, instantly became (and remains) an emblematic case of colonial violence. In Britain, this atrocity came to stand for everything British colonialism supposedly was not, and thus buttressed the claim to British exceptionalism as having a supposedly 'better', less violent colonialism. And yet, such attacks on caves had featured regularly in nineteenth-century British warfare in southern Africa, smoke being supplemented by dynamite from the 1870s onwards, cumulating in the little-known but extensive cave dynamitings in MaShonaland 1896-1897. This article reconstructs that long history, describing not only how practitioners accepted the dynamitings largely unquestioned, but also asking how at the time the British claim to exceptionalism was sustained despite the more than apparent resemblances to foreign cases. Apologists of empire did not cover up the violence but rather defended it; what they chose to remain silent on were the foreign analogies – concealed comparability was key to successfully sustaining British exceptionalism. Given the continued influence of exceptionalist arguments in public debate and historiography, this article finally makes a case to more forcefully place histories of British colonial violence next to those of other empires in an explicitly transimperial framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the Hanslope Park disclosure and the release of the 'migrated archives,' the United Kingdom's (UK) Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) had to supply a reason for how it came to pass those tens of thousands of classified records documenting Britain's colonial administrations were stored in secret for half a century. Officially, the FCO responded that its own accidental neglect had resulted in the scandal. This article, by using archival materials released as part of the 'migrated archives' and research conducted at the Kenyan National Archive, argues that the contrary was true. In response to growing pressures from former colonies and international organisations, the FCO intentionally concealed 'embarrassing' colonial administrative files from public view as a strategy to preserve the UK's diplomatic standing and political prowess amidst the geopolitical shifts caused by decolonisation and the Cold War. The article describes this strategy in the context of colonial fragility, or the cosmetic interest in protecting the UK's reputation as a 'good' state, which in turn propagated harm along racialised lines by dislocating evidence of the colonial past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the influence of the International Labour Organisation on labour policy-making in colonial Nigeria, between 1930 and 1960. Labour historians have argued that the impact of the ILO in colonial Africa was limited by its incapacity to enforce international labour standards and the circumvention of such standards by colonial powers. Using a corpus of new primary sources from the ILO archives in Geneva, this article complicates these arguments by establishing that the influence of the ILO was further compromised by labour unrests and intense rivalry among Nigerian union leaders. Thus, this research establishes a connection, for the first time, between union agitations and disunity in the labour movement and the limited impact of ILO standards in colonial territories. By analysing one country—Nigeria—in detail, as opposed to the empire-wide or regional focus of the extant literature, this research stresses the significance of local contexts to a more nuanced understanding of the limited impact of the ILO in colonial Africa. In addition, by examining labour policy-making from the perspective and archives of a supranational organisation, this article expands our understanding of labour history in colonial Nigeria. Historical research on Nigeria's colonial labour policy-making has mainly focused on two main actors: the colonial government and the trade unions. The British annual reports to the ILO, however, confirms that colonial Nigerian labour policies from the 1930s were incomplete adaptation of ILO conventions. Among other evidence, this article demonstrates that Nigerian trade unions were aware of international labour standards and often referred to them in their negotiations with the government. Thus, although the impact of the ILO was limited as a result of issues discussed in the article, future research ought to recognise the organisation as an important agent in the colonial Nigerian labour policy-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the journey of the Komagata Maru in 1914, and the multiple exclusions of its primarily Sikh passengers from various colonial jurisdictions, through the lenses of global and local legitimacy contestations across the British Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. The paradox of its subjects' mobility (i.e. accommodating the aspirations of 'white-only' self-governing colonies and disapproving the race-based exclusion of its 'non-white' subjects) had consumed the Empire for almost two decades. This contradiction necessitated justifications of exclusion that would be compatible with the liberal ideology of all subjects having equal rights and palatable to the political expediency considerations of different colonies. The transformation of the legal identities of the ship's passengers from 'farmers' to 'labourers' to 'seditionists' during a short span of five months facilitated the institutionalisation of alternative logics of exclusion based on class and loyalty to the Empire. Through an in-depth study of an important episode in colonial history, this article attempts to foreground how intricate linkages among law, legitimacy and identity played out during a critical juncture for the British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that, although anti-colonial delegations to the 1945 San Francisco Conference did not succeed in bringing all colonial territories under the umbrella of international trusteeship, the threat of expanding international oversight shaped the relationship between colonial governments and international organisations in powerful ways. By focusing on how the UN Special Committee on Non-Self-Governing Territories evolved as a de facto supervisory system for dependent territories, this article considers the ways that representatives at the United Nations defined dependency and self-government and explores the crusade that colonial governments led to justify imperialism in the post-war world. Through a consideration of the diplomatic actions of France, Great Britain and Belgium, this article explores the ways that colonial empires jointly mobilised to defend colonialism at the level of the United Nations. In the face of evolving supervisory mechanisms at the United Nations, the French, British and Belgian delegations joined forces in an attempt to expose some of the inherent contradictions in UN policy towards dependent populations, and to make the case that subject populations living in independent territories often endured worse conditions than those living in formal overseas empires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 1767, Jean-Baptiste Domonchy, a French Catholic on the British island of Grenada, sparked an imperial crisis when he attempted to stand for election to the island's assembly. The incorporation of French Catholic subjects into the British Empire after the Treaty of Paris (1763) posed major challenges to prevailing notions of the empire and constitution. At a time when many Britons understood the Protestant faith to be fundamental to the stability of the British state and empire, the large populations of Catholics in the new territories necessitated a reappraisal of exclusionist policies. In demanding, and ultimately gaining, the right to hold office in Grenada's political and legal bodies, the crown's new Catholic subjects generated a crisis that played a crucial role in the formulation of a new model of empire. Utilising the print debate surrounding the decision to allow Catholic subjects to hold public office in Grenada, this article examines contemporary attitudes to toleration within an imperial context and defines the wider implications of the crisis. Whatever their view, contemporaries agreed that Grenada stood at the centre of a broader imperial and constitutional debate. In an increasingly heterogeneous empire where the formation of loyal and stable colonies was a fundamental goal of the British state, the case for a more flexible ideal of empire and the constitution gained traction in the dispute over Grenada. The centrality of the Catholic question to the foundations of the British state makes Grenada a critical test case in the contemporary debates over the nature of the British Empire after 1763. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the Napoleonic wars, British debates about colonial rule and, in particular, the treatment of subject peoples brought practical, financial and religious concerns together. As a means of addressing these problems, the British government despatched a series of travelling commissions to survey and reform the governance of its empire. British-based humanitarians and abolitionists drew on anxieties about the corrupting influence of empire on metropolitan society to press for commissions as vectors of imperial probity; their colonial counterparts harnessed the commissions' authority to inform and persuade a metropolitan audience of the need for specific colonial reforms. This article explores humanitarian attempts to influence colonial and imperial policy by considering the Commission of Eastern Inquiry, appointed in 1822 to investigate successively the Cape Colony, Mauritius and Ceylon. The Commission's history underscores links between networks of metropolitan and colonial humanitarians, and between anti-slavery activists and supporters of indigenous rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]