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Reconfiguring empire: the British World
Introduction
The twenty-first century belatedly rediscovered empire. The forces of globalisation – with their apparent lack of respect for national borders – have propelled a remarkable revival of interest in our imperial past. Whether perceived as precursors to modern globalisation, or its ‘first wave’, empires are widely believed to hold the key to understanding globalisation’s historical roots.1 As one leading scholar has aptly remarked, what were empires if not ‘transnational organisations . . . created to mobilise the resources of the world? Their existence and their unity were made possible by supra-national connections. Their longevity was determined by their ability to extend the reach and maintain the stability of these connections.’2 This belief that trans-national impulses and ideas were intrinsic to the operations of empire, and had far-reaching historical consequences,3 goes a long way to explain why consideration of space and place has loomed so large in the ‘new’ imperial history.4 A ‘radical re-imagining of space and of human relationships to it’ was a concomitant of British expansion overseas.5 Spatial concepts of empire have, of course, long
1 For studies that bring together the diverse consequences of globalisation today, and
its important historical antecedents, see A. Hoogvelt, Globalisation and the Postcolonial
World: The New Political Economy of Development, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2001); and S. Hall, ‘The Local and the Global: Globalisation and Ethnicity’,
in A. McClintock, A. Mufti and E. Shohat (eds.), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation
and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997),
Chapter 9.
2 A. G. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’,
Past & Present (1999), 198–243 (p. 205).
3 K. Grant, P. Levine and F. Trentmann (eds.), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and
Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 12, 7.
4 D. Lambert and A. Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in
Lambert and Lester (eds.), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in
the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–31
(p. 3).
5 H. Michie and R. Thomas (eds.), Nineteenth Century Geographies: The Transformation
of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (Rutgers: Rutgers University
22 Reconfiguring empire: the British World underpinned writing about Europe’s imperial experiences, whether British, French, Dutch, Spanish or Portuguese. Yet it is only relatively recently, after almost half a century of neglect, that the empire’s settler societies – those places where indigenous people were dispossessed, and where Europeans came to form a significant part of the population – have begun to be examined more explicitly, and indeed comparatively, by scholars of empire.6 In Britain’s case, it is apparent that territorial expansion was as much demographic as it was religious, military or bureaucratic.7 From the mid nineteenth century new forms of technology reconfigured the spaces between metropolitan Britain and the overseas ‘British’ societies of the empire, which, in an age of steamship, railway and telegraph, interacted in ways unimaginable even fifty years before. Recent studies focus on the movement of people, goods and capital within these regions of the empire, and the transfer of knowledge and experience among them. They move away from the old historiographical binaries of British ‘metropole’ and colonial ‘periphery’ to visualise the empire as an interconnected zone constituted by multiple points of contact and complex circuits of exchange. In doing so, they raise several significant questions. How did societies that imported a great deal of their population, cultural baggage, ideology and lifestyle, yet jealously guarded their powers of self-government, ‘work out their destinies’? How far did this process involve recognition of their common heritage, as well as ‘an informed appreciation’ of the efforts of British migrants elsewhere to adapt to their distinctive local settings while maintaining links to their imperial homeland?8 What, indeed, were the ties – ancestral,
23Press, 2002), p. 14. For the impact of mass migration from Britain after 1850 on the
‘manner in which people viewed the world and their relationship to it’, see D. A. Bell,
‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space and Empire in British Political Thought,
1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History 77 (2005), 561–2.
6 For new approaches to the comparative study of settler colonialisms (British, French,
German and Japanese), see C. Elkins and S. Pedersen (eds.), Settler Colonialism in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2005). For a previous study setting different
types of settler societies in a comparative framework, see D. Tasiulis and N. Yuval-
Davis (eds.), Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class
(London: Sage, 1995).
7 ‘Blinded by national historiographies and mesmerised by the exotic colonial “other”
we have lost contact with what was always the heart of the imperial enterprise, the
expansion of Britain and the peopling and building of the trans-oceanic British
World.’ See C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in Bridge and
Fedorowich (eds.), The British World: Culture, Diaspora and Identity (London: Taylor
and Francis, 2003), pp. 1–15 (p. 11).
8 For these (and other) questions skilfully posed, see S. Macintyre, ‘History Wars and
the Imperial Legacy in the Settler Societies’, in P. Buckner and D. Francis (eds.),
Rediscovering the British World: Culture and Diaspora (London: Taylor and Francis,
2003), pp. 381–97 (p. 383).
24institutional, linguistic, cultural – that bound this ‘British World’ together? In the words of an historian of modern South Africa: ‘Writing about the British World should do more than tell us about events which happened in that world. It should necessarily involve exploring how such a world was constructed and maintained in its various geographical parts through time . . . writing about the British World should involve “history-of-the-British World”, not just “history-in-the-British World”.’9 Living in, thinking about and identifying with more than one country at once became a defining way of life for many inhabitants of this British World in the half-century before 1914. Various types of migration worked to stitch together the British peoples, with the result that political events, economic cycles and cultural fashions reverberated through the literal and imaginative domains of empire with greater frequency and power. Human movement and human memory, moreover, could often work together to reinforce each other. A cultural knowledge of ancestry and lineage could help to make sense of a connection that may have spanned generations, whether through personal items (such as photographs) or through the realm of material culture: goods branded by cities (lawnmowers from Birmingham, toilets from Staffordshire, cutlery from Sheffield and bicycles from Nottingham) were one way of evoking the proximity, even romance, of Britain.10
It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that scholarship on the British World has evinced a marked enthusiasm for all kinds of trans-national history.11 Temperance reform,12 women’s movements and migration,13 marriage,14 child rescue and welfare,15 popular reading habits,16 labour
9 V. Bickford-Smith, ‘Revisiting Anglicisation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony’,
in Bridge and Fedorowich, The British World, pp. 82–95 (p. 82).
10 We are grateful to Saul Dubow for this observation.
11 For two key works exploring the role of empire in developing trans-national ideas
and institutions, see A. Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism,
Nationalism and Public Health (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); and Grant,
Levine and Trentmann, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950.
12 J. Sturgis, ‘Temperance Reform in the British World’, paper given at the British World
Conference, Institute for Commonwealth Studies, London, 1998.
13 M. Oppenheimer, ‘Women’s Movements and the Empire, 1880–1920’, paper given at
the British World Conference, Institute for Commonwealth Studies, London, 1998.
See also A. McGrath, Entangled Frontiers: Marriage and Sex across Colonizing Frontiers
in Australia and North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
14 B. Bradbury, ‘Rethinking Marriage, Civilization and Nation in Nineteenth-Century
White Settler Societies’, in Buckner and Francis, Rediscovering the British World,
pp. 135–57.
15 S. Swain, ‘Centre and Periphery in British Child Rescue Discourse’, paper given at
the British World Conference, University of Melbourne, July 2004.
16 I. Hofmeyr, ‘Making Bunyan English via Africa’, paper given at the British World
Conference, Institute for Commonwealth Studies, London, 1998, subsequently
25Reconfiguring empire: the British World disputes and doctrines,17 bourgeois consumption,18 penal police and criminal justice,19 and the evolution of land rights and forms of settler racial practices20 – each of these topics has lent itself to fruitful comparative analysis. Part of the attraction of focusing on settler societies as a way of writing trans-national history is that their ideas and institutions stemmed from common roots; they also faced similar problems, especially with respect to their indigenous populations and the political rights and legal status they were to be accorded. The British World concept has thus helped historians to climb out of their national bunkers, making them more aware of what hitherto they may have taken for granted about their own societies, and more mindful of the growing significance of non-national affiliations within them.21
Yet as soon as we begin to re-imagine imperial geographies, we are faced with the tricky question of where power spatially resided.22 For the logic of a ‘networked’ or ‘decentred’ approach to studying empires
published as The Portable Bunyan: A Trans-national History of the Pilgrim’s Progress
(Princeton: Yale University Press, 2004); C. Hilliard, ‘The Tillotson Syndicate
and the Imperial Trade in Fiction’, paper given at the British World Conference,
University of Auckland, July 2005.
17 F. Bongiorno, ‘Fabian Socialism and British Australia, 1890–1972’, in Buckner and
Francis, Rediscovering the British World, pp. 209–31; and J. Hyslop, ‘The British and
Australian Leaders of the South African Labour Movement, 1902–1914: A Group
Biography’, in K. Darian-Smith, P. Grimshaw and S. Macintyre (eds), Britishness
Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 2007), pp. 90–108, and The Notorious Syndicalist: J. T. Bain,
a Scottish Rebel in Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2004). See
also N. Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in
Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London: Merlin Press, 2003).
18 S. Banfield, ‘Towards a History of Music in the British Empire: Three Export
Studies’, in K. Darian-Smith, P. Grimshaw and S. Macintyre (eds.), Britishness
Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 2007), pp. 63–90.
19 See also B. Godfrey and G. Dunstall (eds.), Crime and Empire, 1840–1940: Criminal
Justice in Local and Global Context (Uffculme: Willan, 2005).
20 J. McLaren, A. R. Buck and N. E. Wright (eds.), Land and Freedom: Law, Property Rights
and the British Diaspora (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), and Despotic Dominion: Property
Rights in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
2005); J. Evans, P. Grimshaw, D.Phillips and S. Swain (eds.), Equal Subjects, Unequal
Rights: Indigenous People in British Settler Colonies (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2003).
21 For the potential of cross-national, comparative studies to achieve these and other
things, see especially G. M. Frederickson, ‘From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent
Developments in Cross-National Comparative History’, Journal of American History
82 (1995), 587–604 (pp. 587–8, 604); Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future’, p. 217.
22 See, for example, C. Daniels and M. V. Kennedy (eds.), Negotiated Empires: Centers
and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002), which argues
for peripheries occupying a more central position in the early modern colonial world,
and carrying more power in relation to metropolitan centres than scholars have often
allowed.
26is that metropole and settler colony acted and reacted upon each other in complex ways, and that sovereignty in the colonies, far from being static or stable, was subject to constant negotiation and renegotiation by a variety of settler and non-settler groups.
Nor was the British World sealed off from the rest of the globe. Far from being exclusively British, many of the networks we study overlapped and intersected with other types of network, including those embedded in a wider ‘Atlantic world’, as well as in other western European (the French especially) and extra-European (Ottoman, Chinese and Russian) empires.23 If we are to understand how consumer, investor and merchant networks functioned in the colonies, they need to be placed in this wider international context. As people, goods, ideas and practices moved between and beyond different sites of colonisation, such movement in and of itself shaped and re-shaped experiences of overseas settlement. This, in turn, helps to explain the analytical purchase of categories like ‘space’ and ‘place’: they enable us better to appreciate what was global – and what was not – about Victorian and Edwardian imperialism. The rest of this chapter explores three key themes that underpin our analysis of the interplay of culture and economy in this book: imperial