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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]

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By the nineteenth century, with the advance of British colonial activities, British corporate laws had been transplanted to maritime Asia with varying degrees of vigour. In British Hong Kong, these laws often clashed with native customs. Through a reconstruction of the legal disputes found in urban Hong Kong, this paper discusses how British and Chinese business traditions interacted with each other during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before assessing the historical implications and consequences of these legal decisions, this paper will also explore whether the Chinese institution of tong is compatible with British law in urban Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1914, the Indian Army was deployed against the enemies of the British Empire. This paper analyses the administrative mechanism as well as the imperial assumptions and attitudes which shaped the recruitment policy of the Indian Army during the First World War. From the late nineteenth century, the Martial Race theory (a bundle of contradictory ideas) shaped the recruitment policy. With certain modifications, this theory remained operational to the first decade of the twentieth century. The construction of the ‘martial races’ enabled the British to play-off different communities against each other to prevent the emergence of a unified anti-British sentiment among the colonized. During the Great War, faced with the rising demands of manpower, the army was forced to modify the Martial Race theory. However, a conscript army did not emerge in British-India. This was due to imperial policies, the inherent social divisions of Indian society, and because the demands for military manpower remained relatively low in comparison to India's demographic resources. Due to innovations in the theory and praxis of recruitment, the volume of recruitment showed a linear increase from 1914 to 1918, with maximum intensification of recruitment occurring during 1917 and 1918. But as the war ended in November 1918, despite the entry of several new communities, the bulk of the Indian Army still came from the traditional martial races. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the growth of the British commercial communities in the Straits Settlements in the first half of the nineteenth century. It describes how they emerged as a coherent commercial and political interest group, separate from the Indian empire, with their own network of allies and commercial partners in Britain. As such, the Straits merchants emerged as a significant political lobby in their own right. It contends that in the process, they revived earlier notions of Southeast Asia as a discrete geographical region, in which political and ethnic diversity was bridged by the flourishing of maritime commercial networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that from circa 1845–1857, British colonial officials and administrators, abetted by Protestant missionaries and some so-called 'native Christians', attempted to replace Brahmanical regulation of everyday life with what I am calling 'governance by conscience' in British India. It uses the 1851 legal ruling in Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae , hailed by some for bringing 'liberty of conscience' and condemned by others as a wanton violation of Hindu personal law, to elucidate the connections between the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 (Act XXI) and education. My analysis highlights the centrality of Brahman wives and gender to debates about conscience, caste, property, and Christian conversion. During the violent summer of 1857, some condemned the Act and its use in deciding the case of Narayen Ramchundur versus Luxmeebae as provocation for the traumatic disorders then threatening to dismantle Britain's Indian empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1786 and the 1860s, Penang Island was transformed from a lush tropical island into a British colony covered in ordered plantations. As a consequence of Britain's temporary possession of the fabled Spice Islands, nutmeg emerged as the most important crop, but after decades of experimentation and uncertainty, its cultivation ultimately failed. Although the struggle for nutmeg to become commercially viable was heavily dependent on global price fluctuations and official support, this article focuses on local factors such as shortages of labour, the specific skills of the island's various ethnic groups and reliance on indigenous agricultural techniques. The story of nutmeg cultivation in Penang can then be situated within a wider historiography concerned with the transmission of botanical knowledge and plant transfer, as well as the ecological impact of colonial agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What causes imperialism? Classic explanations of imperialism theorized causes within the imperial metropole, such as nationalist culture or the imperatives of capital accumulation. More recent theories emphasize global pressures. To assess these longstanding but rarely adjudicated theories, this paper employs original time-series data and qualitative evidence on British imperialism from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The analysis shows that British imperialism was not only a domestically produced process but also a global one. British imperialism was a strategy for meeting the state's imperatives of geopolitical security (containment) and economic growth (capital) in the face of external threats. Those threats were most likely to be perceived when the global system was at its most economically competitive. These findings affirm a “structural competition” approach that builds upon existing global-oriented theories but specifies the structural conditions and causal processes driving imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the meanings and controversies surrounding sales by public auction in British colonial Calcutta and in London during the last decades of the eighteenth century. For Britons living in Calcutta's European sector, auctions were essential for acquiring imported European items that granted a sense of gentility and Britishness abroad. Public sales in Calcutta provided Britons with goods that instilled the fantasy of living in a British geography in India. However, by the last quarter of the century, 'sales by hammer' throughout the colonial world carried association with corruption, cruelty, and orientalization in the metropolitan imagination. In Britain, textual and visual accounts circulated of Europeans transforming into debauched 'nabobs', of the horrors of American slave auctions, and of the British East India Company's use of public sales to defraud and abuse prominent Indians. For some metropolitan observers, sales by hammer were a deceitful means of seizing property and status from the traditional landed elite of India and Britain. British critics feared that colonial auction practices could become common in Britain and could lead to the upending of social hierarchization and the normalization of slavery in the metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: Persistent inequalities exist in how individuals from minority ethnic groups access mental health care. A failure to investigate how these inequalities are experienced and what they mean to people with psychosis has privileged professional narratives and hindered our understanding of how they are sustained and what could be done to reduce them. The aim of this study was to investigate the long-term experience of living with psychosis and navigating mental health services within different ethnic groups. Method: Our approach was informed by work on narrative analysis and prioritised the meaning that mental health services held for participants. In-depth interviews with 17 black Caribbean, 15 white British and 3 non-British white people with psychosis as part of AESOP-10, a 10-year follow-up of an ethnically diverse cohort of individuals with first-episode psychosis in the UK. Thematic narrative analysis was used to examine experiences at the personal level within and then across the individual accounts. Results: Service users shared many defining experiences and narratives frequently returned to individuals' first contact with mental health services, first hospital admission, the experience of impatient wards, and the meaning of medication and diagnosis in their lives. We found that experiences of powerlessness punctuated the journey through mental health services and this appeared to dominate the accounts of black Caribbean, and to a lesser extent, white British participants. The findings reveal how negative expectations and experiences of mental health services are compounded over time, creating a vicious cycle of disempowerment and mistrust that manifests for many in resistance to – or at the best passive acceptance of – intervention by mental health services. High levels of need, coupled with alienation from services, contributed to negative patterns of service use among black Caribbean participants. White participants recounted substantial, though fewer, experiences of disempowerment and more instances of shared decision making that for some helped protect positive aspects of their lives. Conclusions: Against a background of entrenched social and economic disempowerment, services were experienced as disempowering by many black Caribbean people, compounding and perpetuating a sense of alienation. Concerted efforts by services to more systematically target social needs and to share power through partnership working may reduce the mistrust that many with psychosis feel when entering services and in turn reduce persistent inequalities across ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical accounts of colonial science and medicine have failed to engage with the Colonial Office's shift in focus towards the support of research after 1940. A large new fund was created in 1940 to expand activities in the colonies described as fundamental research. With this new funding came a qualitative shift in the type of personnel and activity sought for colonial development and, as a result, a diverse group of medical and technical officers existed in Britain's colonies by the 1950s. The fact that such variety existed amongst British officers in terms of their qualifications, institutional locations and also their relationships with colonial and metropolitan governments makes the use of the term 'expert' in much existing historical scholarship on scientific and medical aspects of empire problematic. This article will consider how the Colonial Office achieved this expansion of research activities and personnel after 1940. Specifically, it will focus on the reasons officials sought to engage individuals drawn from the British research councils to administer this work and the consequences of their involvement for the new apparatus established for colonial research after 1940. An understanding of the implications of the application of the research council system to the Colonial Empire requires engagement with the ideology promoted by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) which placed emphasis on the distinct and higher status of fundamental research and which privileged freedom for researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very little has been published on British political activity in the province of Baghdad in the nineteenth century. Indeed, those formally responsible for it – officials in India – considered the region insignificant. This article argues, however, that it was not insignificant either to men on the spot or to influential British public figures in London and Constantinople. These men argued for its strategic and commercial potential, based on an inter-continental rather than a narrowly Indian view of policy, and optimism about the transformative material and moral power of steamships. Their pressure was responsible for the introduction of British armed steamers to the Mesopotamian rivers in 1835 and their retention throughout the century. This helped to ensure that the British had greater power in the region than any rival. The British also cultivated good relations with Arabs, expecting Ottoman rule to collapse in favour of something more progressive. The case of Baghdad shows the value for diplomatic historians of seeing Britain's European and Indian strategy as connected. It also raises doubts about the importance to British officials of promoting specific commercial interests abroad: the British in the region were much more concerned with the projection of power, reliability, and even-handedness. For the early Victorian mind, the key to progress was surely not the making of particular tariff arrangements, but the dynamic potential of steam itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article recounts the unusual history of a national idea in late colonial Singapore from the 1930s to the early 1950s before Singapore's attainment of partial self-government in 1955. Using two different concepts, namely ‘colonial nationalism’ and ‘imperial citizenship’, it offers a genealogy of nationalism in Singapore, one that calls into question the applicability of prevailing theories of anti-colonial nationalism to the Singapore-in-Malaya context. Focusing on colonial nationalism, the article provides a historical account of English-mediated official multiculturalism through tracking shifting British colonial priorities, ideologies of governance and challenges to its authority in Singapore. This account is rarely appreciated in Singapore today given official scripting of national history that abets particular amnesias with regards to its multicultural nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1949 and 1951, the Communities Liaison Committee (CLC), an unofficial body comprising leaders from the main Malayan ethnic communities, served as a prototype for elite intercommunal conflict resolution during a very challenging period amid an ongoing communist insurgency. Drawing upon previously inaccessible primary sources, this article reassesses the CLC's work towards resolving divisive issues such as Malay economic backwardness, federal citizenship, national identity, education and language in Malaya. This article argues that the CLC played a significantly bigger role than previously recognised and influenced government policy considerably. Equally importantly, it entrenched the concept of consociationalism, which was to shape the Malayan political landscape long thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Faced with a confusing range of fluid ethnicities when they conquered Kenya, colonial officials sought to shift conquered populations into manageable administrative units. In linking physical space to ethnic identity, the Kenyan reserve system assumed that each of these ‘tribes’ had a specific homeland. Yet the reserves in the central Kenyan highlands soon became overcrowded and socially restive because they could not accommodate population growth and private claims to land for commercial agriculture. Although colonial officials proclaimed themselves the guardians of backward tribal peoples, they tried to address this problem by creating mechanisms whereby surplus populations would be ‘adopted’ into tribes living in less crowded reserves. This article provides new insights into the nature of identity in colonial Kenya by telling the stories of two types of Kikuyu migrants who settled in the Meru Reserve. The first much larger group did so legally by agreeing to become Meru. The second openly challenged the colonial state and their Meru hosts by defiantly proclaiming themselves to be Kikuyu. These diverse ways of being Kikuyu in the Meru Reserve fit neither strict primordial nor constructivist conceptions of African identity formation. The peoples of colonial Kenya had options in deciding how to identify themselves and could assume different political and social roles by invoking one or more of them at a time and in specific circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article (originally given as the Annual War Studies Lecture at King's College, London, on 25 January 2010) challenges the assumption that Britain's relationship to genocide is constituted by its ‘vigilance’ towards the genocide of others. Through a critical overview of the question of genocide in the historical and contemporary politics of the British state and society, the article suggests their wide-ranging, complex relationships to genocide. Utilising a conception of genocide as multi-method social destruction and applying the interpretative frames of the genocide literature, it argues that the British state and elements of identifiably British populations have been involved directly and indirectly in genocide in a number of different international contexts. These are addressed through five themes: the role of genocide in the origins of the British state; the problem of genocide in the Empire and British settler colonialism; Britain's relationships to twentieth-century European genocide; its role in the genocidal violence of decolonisation; and finally, Britain's role in the genocidal crises of the post-Cold War world. The article examines the questions of national responsibility that this survey raises: while rejecting simple ideas of national responsibility as collective guilt, it nevertheless argues that varying kinds of responsibility for genocide attach to British institutions, leaders and population groups at different points in the history surveyed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reintegrates the colonization of Tangier into our understanding of the development of the English empire in the latter half of the seventeenth century. At its acquisition in 1661, Tangier appeared integral to the imperial ambitions of the restored monarchy and promised to carry England's commercial and maritime empire into the Mediterranean. This article argues that the particular conceptions of imperial and commercial organization that underlay the occupation of Tangier isolated the city from England's wider empire and contributed to its failure. The creation of a free port and crown colony at Tangier reflected prevalent perceptions of the political economy of trade in the Mediterranean, but added to a wider process whereby ideological debates over the organization of trade and empire helped to create legal and jurisdictional boundaries that differentiated oceanic space. As a free port, Tangier was out of place within an empire increasingly defined by exclusive and restricted trade. It was, however, the ideological significance of Tangier's status as a crown colony that made it unsustainable. Unable to sustain or surrender its sovereignty over Tangier, the crown abandoned the city in the face of Moroccan empire-building. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most important minorities in the British colonial empire in Asia consisted of those of mixed European and Asian parentage and/or ancestry, or Eurasians, as they were widely known. It is perhaps surprising that despite the voluminous literature written about British colonial communities in the East, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to Eurasians and their histories. A closer examination of the members of this marginalised colonial category is nevertheless crucial as they stood at the problematic boundaries of racial politics and identity, and are therefore vital to our understanding of the tensions of empire. The few existing studies of Eurasians in British Asia have tended to focus on the experiences of Eurasians either before or after the Second World War, neglecting the period of Japanese occupation as a significant epoch in the evolution of these communities. In reality, if we intend to unravel the multi-layered history of Eurasians in this region, we must examine the critical position of these colonial communities during this tumultuous period. The nuances of their intriguing wartime relationships with both the British and the Japanese also merit serious attention. With these aims in mind, this article will investigate the compelling experiences of Eurasian communities in Japanese-occupied British Asia, with an especial focus on those who were incarcerated by the Japanese in civilian internment camps in Hong Kong and Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

J. S. Furnivall, in his influential account of the impact of British rule in Burma 1824–1948, argues that British officials laid down a Liberal administration that exposed the colony to market forces, monetized the economy and devastated communities. However, there is little evidence that British administrators actually thought in Liberal terms: they relied heavily on institutions inherited from the Burmese monarchy, and when they introduced new administrative methods these were drawn from other parts of British India and only indirectly influenced by Liberalism. Furnivall's view of the ideological origins of British administration, in turn, distorts his reading of the impact of British rule, as illustrated by recent work on the pre-colonial economy showing that it was in fact more monetized and commercialized than he claims. If his account of the pre-modern economy is not viable, Furnivall's claims about the impact of British colonialism in Burma demand re-evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses letters of petition as historical sources, focusing on letters written by Nigerians in Eastern Nigeria to British officials during World War II. It examines Nigeria's war economy and an economic depression, commenting on food production, shortages, and price controls. The author analyzes the petitions, which were mainly addressed to the British District Office, as responses to British colonialism and imperialism. The experiences of the towns of Aba and Onitsha are also considered.

This article examines the significance of Buddhism in the insurgency that followed the annexation of the kingdom of Burma in 1886, demonstrating that Buddhism was a critically important part of the Burmese polity and identity. Moreover, it indicates that opposition to the British after the full colonisation of Burma was not only instantaneous, but also fuelled primarily by Buddhist sentiment. This challenges the prevailing notion that anti-colonialism in Burma -- Buddhist-inspired or otherwise -- was a twentieth century phenomenon. Beginning with the pre-colonial era, the article explores the intimate connection between Buddhism, the Burmese polity and the national psyche. The critical importance of the Buddhist king is emphasised in particular. When the kingdom of Burma was annexed in 1886, opposition to the British manifested itself instantaneously in the form of rebellions and insurgency. This period, sometimes referred to as the "pacification", has been often ignored in studies. The article, using British colonial documents, shows clearly the importance of Buddhist sentiment in these uprisings as a response to the abolition of Burma's last Buddhist king. Buddhist themes present in translated rebel proclamations, as well as the widespread participation of Buddhist monks corroborate this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Influential studies by Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson claim that colonial legacies explain the origins of development-promoting property rights and thus account for the modern world income distribution. Specifically, they argue that European colonial powers engineered a global 'reversal of fortune', bringing property rights and prosperity to relatively uninhabited colonies while imposing inefficient institutions on locales with less potential for settlement. We re-evaluate their theoretical arguments and empirical findings and come to a different conclusion. We concur that British colonialism dramatically restructured four colonies, resulting in phenomenal economic success. For the majority of the world, however, colonialism had no discernible effect on property rights. We conclude that contemporary development studies must find another explanation for the modern world income distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents fresh evidence on nutrition and health in colonial Kenya by using a new and comprehensive data set of African army recruits and civilians and applying a powerful measure of nutritional status: mean population height. Findings demonstrate huge regional inequalities, but only minor changes in the mean height of cohorts born 20 years before and after colonization. From 1920 onwards secular improvements took place, which continued after independence. I conclude that however bad colonial policies and devastating short-term crises were, the net outcome of colonial times was a significant progress in nutrition and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the court case of Muhammadu Aminu, a former political agent in Africa and the chief alkali of Kano, Nigeria, who was charged with dealing slaves. The author discusses the influence of ambiguities in colonial law in the outcome of the court case. Several excerpts of the court proceedings are presented

ABSTRACTYule and Burnell's 1886 Anglo-Indian dictionary still fascinates and informs today. It is not the finest of Salman Rushdie's writings, but this is the first paragraph of his essay Hobson-Jobson(italics in original):?The British Empire, many punditsnow agree, descended like a juggernautupon the barbicansof the East, in search of loot. The mogulsof the rajwent in palanquins, smoking cheroots, to sup toddyor sherbeton the verandahsof the gymkhanaclub, while the memsahibsfretted about the thugsin bandannasand dungareeswho roamed the night like pariahs, plotting ghoulishdeeds.? (Rushdie, 1992:81)Rushdie points out that the italicised words all appear in the celebrated dictionary Hobson-Jobson: a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms, etymological, historical, geographical and discursiveby Henry Yule & A.C. Burnell, first published in 1886.This gem of a dictionary gives definitions and origins of words in common use by the British in colonial India in the late nineteenth century. Some of the entries won't be a surprise to readers ? we all know that raj, mogul and memsahib are Indian words. But there are many words with their origins in Hindustani, Bengali, Sanskrit or other Indian or Eastern languages, whose origin is perhaps not quite so well known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last two years of the Great War the British government undertook a global propaganda campaign to generate support for the military advance into the Near East, British post-war domination of the region, and the war effort in general. The objective was to transform how the West and the peoples of the Ottoman empire perceived the Orient, its future, and the British empire. To fit with the international demand that the war should be fought for the cause of national self-determination, the Orient was re-defined as the Middle East: a region of oppressed nations that required liberation and tutelage by Britain and the entente. Great Britain was portrayed as the pre-eminent champion of the principle of nationality, which was behind its move into the Middle East. it is argued in this article that these narratives constituted a significant change in Western representations of the Orient and the British empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the demographic history of British soldiers in Tenasserim, Burma in the early 19th century. Mortality experience of the soldiers during the colonial period; Comparison of the data with that of similar populations in other tropical locations; Low mortality levels in Tenasserim compared to other tropical locations.

Examines the eighteenth-century empire in England, which had virtually no army and only a handful of administrators in its American colonies. The three different types of Anglo-American interests, including merchant groups; English and American dissenters; What the group of dissenters consisted of; Description of the lay group; The number of useful resources that dissenting lobbyists had; Details of the Toleration Act; More.

This article presents the author's views on the essay regarding the British Empire and the American Constitution. The author cites the book "Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788," by Jack P. Greene to elaborate his points. The book has a grand scope, pursuing its constitutional theme through nine chapters divided into three sections: "A Problem Experienced, 1607-I 763"; "A Problem Defined, 1764-1776"; and "A Problem Resolved, 1776-1788." Thus Greene carries forward the colonial quest for power to its national fruition in the form of the Constitution of 1787.

The article focuses on the history of the American Revolution. The American Revolution refers to the period during the last half of the 18th century in which the thirteen colonies gained independence from the British Empire to become the U.S. The American Revolution included a series of broad intellectual and social shifts that occurred in early American society, such as the new republican ideals that took hold in the American population.