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The Chattri Indian Monument, erected upon the Sussex Downs above Brighton in 1921, commemorates the Hindu and Sikh soldiers who died in hospitals in Brighton as a result of wounds received fighting for the British Empire in the First World War. The form and name of the monument reference the chatrī, an architectural element characteristic of historical palaces and tombs of northern India. The monument, designed by an Indian architect, Elias Henriques, was intended by the India Office and officials in Brighton to be legible as a hybrid structure, both Indian and British. Conceived as a respectful act of eulogy in honour of Indian soldiers who died in the imperial forces, it nonetheless enshrines the ideology of white supremacy upon which the British Empire rested, and thus embodies the ambiguities of imperial mourning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores historiography and biographical writing in modern South Asia. The social role of autobiographies is considered in terms of the construction of history from personal archives and correspondence. The author reflects on the careers of prominent political leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi as historical sources and reflective of a global intellectual network. The corporate live of educational institutions are considered in light of the social attitudes and patterns that shape individual lives during the educational experience. Other topics include colonial education in India, family histories, and changing political systems.

This symposium has explored New Dominion constitutionalism inductively and contextually, placing the phenomenon within a historically nested set of ideas and practices from the Old (Settler) Dominions, through the "Bridge Dominion" of Ireland, before giving detailed attention to the South Asian New Dominions of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The articles collectively form a basis from which to analyze the legal configuration of New Dominion status and its legacy by exploring links between New Dominion constitutional framing and post-independence design and practice. Building on the case studies, the principal contention of this summative contribution is that New Dominion constitutionalism should be understood as the first constitutional model of note designed to manage political transitions on a global scale. A product of the twilight of the British Empire, New Dominion constitutionalism represents a model for decolonizing nations and an important antecedent to later post-Cold War transitions. Both transitional and transnational, New Dominion status offered an interim frame of government for political transitions, the fuzzy center of which derived from Westminster-style conventions of political constitutionalism, as well as a template establishing the legal basis for constituting the fully independent state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2010, the then British Foreign Secretary William Hague delivered Canning House's annual lecture on the topic of Britain's relations with Latin America. In launching the so-called 'Canning Agenda', Hague pledged to 'halt the decline in Britain's diplomatic presence in Latin America'. 'It is now time', Hague went on, 'for an advance to begin'. This article represents the first scholarly analysis of this policy. In particular, it assesses British efforts to enhance its economic ties with the countries of Latin America; the status granted to Latin America in Britain's strategic world-view in the post-Brexit era; the impact on Britain of other external powers in the region; and the political relationships between Britain and the countries of Latin America. The article draws on interviews with the key policy-makers involved in the Canning Agenda, including William Hague, Sir Hugo Swire, Jeremy Browne, and several other officials and diplomats from Britain and throughout Latin America. It concludes that while an identifiable effort to enhance Britain's economic and political standing in Latin America is discernible since 2010, major impediments to achieving this goal persist across the range of areas explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides the first significant scholarly treatment of "The Conference on Some Living Religions within the British Empire," which took place between September 22 and October 2, 1924, in conjunction with the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. An unprecedented event in Britain's history, the conference brought numerous scholars and "holy men of the Empire" to London. As a catalyst for the modern study of religion, the conference merits comparison to the better-known Parliament of the World's Religions that met in Chicago in 1893. Based on extensive archival research in the United Kingdom and on contemporary newspaper reportage, the article argues that knowledge of this conference helps redress general inattention to the history of interreligious dialogue. What is more, it contributes to the rich literature on "religion and empire" that has emerged in recent years, not least in the pages of JAAR. Finally, it argues that an analysis of this conference partly confirms and partly contests "orientalism" as a helpful category for understanding Western engagement with non-Western religions and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the decade following 1918, HMS Victory was restored as a memorial to the nation, empire, the Navy, and all the sailors who had lost their lives in the Great War. This piece of Britain's naval heritage became a focal point for Great War memory and a resource for narrating the Navy's place in post-war Britain. This article analyses the restoration campaign, focusing on its appeal work and the materials it produced, discourses surrounding the restoration and the use of Victory's oak to recover this ship's importance at the intersection between Britain and its Navy in the aftermath of the Great War, and the function that the Navy played in the construction of post-war memory and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 6 million Britons travelled to southern Africa during the Second World War as evacuees, to convalesce, for military training and en route to the battle fronts of Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Wartime travel provided more Britons than ever before with first-hand experience of white privilege and the lifestyle it provided in the settler colonial societies of southern Africa, convincing many to relocate there permanently. Wartime memoirs and letters reveal the ways in which the war both led to the strengthening of existing personal relationships between the UK and the settler colonies of southern Africa and the formation of new ones, including marriages. They also suggest that, for many, the heightened experience of the war and the exhilaration of living through extraordinary times made the return to normal life in Britain difficult. Southern Africa, with its combination of the familiar and the exotic, was an appealing alternative. Though the vast majority returned to the UK after the war, this collective first-hand experience influenced broader perceptions of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia as places of abundance, hospitality, and opportunity. This case study draws attention to the way the wartime travel provided more Britons than ever before with direct experience of imperial sites and suggests that this contributed to the continuing significance of empire, and especially the Dominions in post-war Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In February 1967, officials from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were horrified when the American west-coast magazine, Ramparts, exposed the U.S. intelligence organization's longstanding financial relationships with a number of international educational institutions and cultural bodies. In a series of articles, reproduced in The New York Times and The Washington Post, Ramparts documented the CIA's provision of covert funding to, among others, the National Students Association, Asia Foundation, and Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). In India, an outpouring of public indignation ensued when it became clear that the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, a local offshoot of the CCF, had accepted money from the CIA. The global spotlight cast upon some of the CIA's more questionable activities had a profound and enduring impact upon Indian perceptions of the United States' government and its external intelligence service. In the wake of the Ramparts scandal, the CIA came to occupy a prominent place in Indo–U.S. cultural and political discourse. For the remainder of the twentieth century, and beyond, anti-American elements inside and outside India drew repeatedly upon the specter of CIA subversion as a means of undermining New Delhi s relationship with Washington. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the international engagement with Africa from the First World War and the apex of colonial rule through to the present day. It is argued that there have been dramatic shifts throughout this period-from increasing interventionism on the part of the colonial state, to decolonization and the emergence of nation-states with independent foreign policy programmes, to the predations and influences of the Cold War, to the developmentalism and humanitarianism of the contemporary era. Yet, there has also been marked continuity in terms of policy, perception and practice. In particular, Africa has long been seen in terms of economic opportunity-a place where markets and raw materials abound-and of military and political threat, a place in which intrinsic instability makes external intervention both desirable and inevitable. While immediate contexts have changed over time, the international engagement with the continent remains essentially economic and military. A concern for democratization and development represents a relatively new element, although even this can be traced to the paternalistic humanitarianism of the colonial era and, earlier still, moral stances toward Africa in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the writings of Muslim intellectual travelers from older Islamic lands in Asia visiting so-called western areas such as Great Britain, Germany, and Egypt between 1870 and 1930. It examines their perceptions of the concepts of space and time brought about by travel via steamship and rail, in addition to the development of industrial communication. According to the author, such journeys were transformative events and reshaped formulations of language, history, and geography. The article discusses Europe as a place for the rediscovery of Islam among Muslim travelers.

This article adds empirical and historical depth to the debate about security sector reform (SSR) by analysing British-led reform of the Sierra Leone Police (SLP) against the backdrop of late-colonial policing reforms. It argues that the security–development logic that frames SSR skates gingerly over a difficult problem familiar from the late-colonial period: that of investing sufficient coercive capacity in the state for it to withstand threats without simultaneously making it more effective at oppression. Whereas colonial discourse balanced the goal of introducing a civilian order against relatively specific advice on how to organize and use force in emergencies, the security–development discourse offers little guidance as to the type and level of force the police should be equipped with in the service of development. The supply of more than £1m worth of weapons and munitions to the SLP illustrates the inherent dilemma of SSR in weak states, and by strengthening the coercive capacity of the state it may ultimately jeopardize the success of police reform in Sierra Leone. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Derided by British intellectuals as ‘propaganda of inanity unparalleled in the world’s history’ and as an ‘impertinence’ toward educated Indians, the ‘smiling tours’ of the Prince of Wales to India and then West and South Africa in the early 1920s offer a unique lens through which to explore the largely unwritten history of African and Indian empire loyalism in a comparative frame. Whereas the loyalism of the ‘Black Englishmen’ and their faith in the civilizing mission is generally assumed to have become obsolete after the First World War, the vigorous engagement of western educated African and Indian elites with the symbolism and politics of these royal tours reveals that, however compromised and contested, loyalism retained saliency for many nationalist leaders and intellectuals well into the 1920s and that the idea of imperial monarchy continued to serve as a moral reference point and the embodiment of the freedoms and rights implicit in a liberal empire. Loyalism, expressed as fidelity to the monarch, moreover, is explored in its many guises and aspects, ranging from an expression of deep affective ties to scorching criticisms of administrations that had betrayed the imperial faith and notions of equality of all subjects of the crown. Laying claim to ‘true’ loyalty’, many Indian and African writers compared theirs with what they claimed was the self-serving, narrow loyalty of white settlers and colonial bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an examination of diasporic Indians living in Kenya during the period between 1930 and 1950 and explores how these Indians expressed themselves politically. It discusses various issues related to diasporas including the expression of identity in the hostladn and anticolonialism. It explores the historical circumstances that led to the Indian diaspora to Kenya, it discusses the relationship between hostland and homeland and examines Indian political leaders that emerged in Kenya.

The article presents an examination freedom in India and applies the critical category of difference in its assessment of the Gandhian nonviolent resistance to British colonialism. It discusses the application of Western concepts in explaining the historical development of India and examines how this practice, which is grounded in Western historical experiences, creates negative conceptualizations of Indian development. It explores how the type freedom sought by the Gandhian movement differed from Western concepts of freedom and examines the historical roots of India's notion of freedom.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue on historians and biography including one by LIana Vardi on the fashion for scholarly historical biography, another by Robin Fleming different kind of early medieval biography on her subject "Eighteen," who was a leper, and one by Kessler-Harris on Virginia Woolf's essay "The Art of Biography."

This article presents an exploration into the controversies and difficulties surrounding the judicial decisions of India concerning religious conversion, the caste system and human civil rights. The primarily secularist ideology of the Indian government is highlighted, but contrasted against the large Muslim population and the challenge of upholding the Hindu caste system. The trend of Indian legislature against conversion is also discussed.

The article discusses the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The poets admired each other for their poetry and their contributions to the nationalist movements of their respective countries. Anticolonial nationalists criticized both poets. Tagore and Yeats were accused of being pro-British elitists instead of true nationalists. The article argues that the nationalism practiced by Tagore and Yeats more closely resembles new cosmopolitanism than traditional nationalism.

This article analyzes Woodrow Wilson's role in the rise in anti-colonial revolt immediately following World War I. Wilson's idealism and emphasis on self-determination initially inspired many in the East to hope that European imperialism would come to an end. Wilson spent much of 1918 and early 1919 using the rhetoric of government by consent, though he may have only meant the territories within Europe ruled by empires. Eventually, his message penetrated the nascent political press and consciousness of China and India. However, disillusionment was quick to set in after the disappointments of the Versailles Peace Conference.

Leo Amery has long been seen as one of the leading figures in the anti-appeasement movement. However, key aspects of his case against government foreign policy are not addressed in previous work. This article considers Amery's reputation pointing out that it is problematic to characterize him as an ‘anti-appeaser’ because he did not rule out concessions to Germany and was willing to see Germany dominate Central Europe. However, he differed from the government in advocating a Danubian economic bloc to create stability and satisfy some German desires. This flowed from Amery's imperialism and his economic nationalism. Meanwhile, he fervently opposed colonial concessions, believing that German grievances could only be satisfied in Europe. Considering whether Amery was an ‘anti-appeaser’ or a ‘real appeaser’, the article analyses Amery's doubts over whether to support Neville Chamberlain over the Munich agreement. It concludes that although Amery disagreed with Chamberlain more on tactics than strategy, these alternative tactics were significantly different from government policy. As such, aspects of the anti-appeasement case should be seen as being more nuanced than previously recognized, and the imperialist dimension of it should be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explains why pessimism about the chances of success of military intervention had become an immovable feature of the British official mind by 1965. Several factors including the attitudes and capabilities of the British and Rhodesian military and the possibility of South African intervention are examined. The British military planning staff conducted investigations into the feasibility of a military operation to overcome settler resistance in Central Africa.

This article uses correspondence from former members of the Rhodesian security services, recent oral testimony from British politicians and civil servants, and newly available documentary evidence from archives around the world, to re-examine the viability of British military intervention in Rhodesia during 1964 and 1965. It argues that the military and political obstacles to the use of force cited at the time and since have been grossly exaggerated. This article argues that with sufficient resolve, the Labour government led by Harold Wilson could have used force in an attempt to prevent or end Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence of 11 November 1965. This might have offered a possible solution to one of the most protracted and embarrassing international problems that confronted successive British governments during disengagement from Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Features Richard Gregg, the first U.S. major theorist of militant nonviolence. Books that influenced his thinking; Career background; Details of Gregg's personal and intellectual journey; Argument of Gregg on the self-conscious method of social action; Contribution to the U.S. politics and intellectual life.

This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the transfer of power in British tropical Africa from 1958 to 1964. It suggests that, from around 1962, the British government actively encouraged African states to move straight to republican status on independence, rather than retaining the Queen as their head of state. Ministers and officials feared that the subsequent adoption of republican constitutions by states that had initially retained the monarchy might prove an embarrassment to the Queen. This determination to shield the monarch from embarrassment appears to have been the overriding factor in British calculations. In this respect the monarchy was, perhaps, an excessively fragile instrument for the promotion of Britain's relations with its former colonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces several history books. 'From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Future,' edited by Brian Keith Axel; 'Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective,' edited by Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey; 'The Worlds of the East India Company,' edited by H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln and Nigel Rigby.

Presents an obituary for Josef Polisenský, the most prominent and distinguished Czech historians of the twentieth century who died on January 11, 2001.

Criticizes the poem 'The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits,' by Bernard Mandeville. Highlights the debates over luxury and the emergence of political economy; Relationship between modern consumerism and classical economic models of consumption; Recreation of public benefits of increased national wealth.

Focuses on the influence of imperialism and nationalism on the modern history in India. Nature of late colonial state power; Analysis of the political negotiation and mass mobilization; Enhancement of the resource extraction.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, economic relations between Britain and the Commonwealth were very close, and the Empire was of greater economic importance to Britain than at any previous time. International economic conditions were dominated by the dollar shortage, and especially after the sterling crisis of 1947 most of the sterling area members of the Commonwealth were drawn into even closer interdependence. But, in contrast to the expectations of many policy makers, the world economy after the war was characterized by buoyant demand and limited supply. In particular, the demands placed on British production and finance highlighted the limitations of capacity. Development in both the independent and Colonial Commonwealth was frustrated. The inadequacies of the closed system revealed in the late 1940s encouraged Commonwealth countries to push for the restoration of currency convertibility and of multilateralism in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Deals with self-definition and the description of general divide among members of Chinese immigrant families in the U.S. in 'Eat a Bowl of Tea,' a novel by Asian American author Louis Chu. Plot of the novel; Characters of the novel; Implications of the rigid adherence to the ideals of an idealized Chinese culture.