30Chapters 3–5 explore the significance of these networks of contact and communication for patterns of economic behaviour and decisionmaking. In particular, they draw attention to the role of networks in forging shared cultures of consumption and setting norms of desirable lifestyles across English-speaking societies, and to their role in spreading new technologies and commercial practices across geographically disparate markets. These networks were not all equivalent, however. Some were more transient than others, some more powerful, and some impinged more on people’s day-to-day lives. Hence it is necessary to look closely at their content as well as their volume, and to be precise about their effects.
Britishness at home and abroad
The fact that British expansion was as much a demographic as it was a military, administrative or religious phenomenon has profound implications for the study of imperial culture within Britain.36 We take as our starting point the idea that the empire was of as much concern to those who settled in it as it was to those who administered it, or fought for it, or preached in it. Migration loomed large in the imperial imaginary: it was a force to be reckoned with in nineteenth-century British society. Crucially, it shaped people’s views of what kind of empire Britain possessed, and how that empire might be fashioned towards their own particular designs.
Flag, One Throne, One Empire: Canada’s Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire and
Women’s Part in the Making of the British Imperial Past (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002); E. van Heyningen and P. Merrett, ‘ “The Healing Touch”:
The Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, 1900–1912’, paper given at the British
World Conference, University of Cape Town, July 2002; J. Carey, ‘Recreating
British Womanhood: Ethel Osborne and Melbourne Society in the Early Twentieth
Century’, in Darian-Smith et al., Exploring the British World, pp. 21–39; B. Theron,
‘Challenging Gender Conventions: Some English-Speaking Women in South Africa
during the Anglo-Boer War’, paper given at the British World Conference, University
of Melbourne, July 2004; and K. Pickles, ‘Female Imperialism in the British World’,
paper given at The British World Conference, Universitiy of Auckland, July 2005. See
also J. Bush, Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (London: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2000).
36 The questions of what the settler empire meant to people living in the British Isles,
and of how it relates to Britain’s ‘domestic’ history, have generated a great deal of
debate. For key protagonists, see C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in
the English Imagination, 1830–67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
B. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?.
See also S. Ward’s review essay, ‘Echoes of Empire’, HWJ 62 (2006), 264–78, esp.
pp. 268–71.
31Reconfiguring empire: the British World In remaking ‘British’ society and culture overseas, colonists were not passive recipients of empire.37 Rather, they developed and defined ‘Britishness’ in their own distinctive ways. Indeed, British migrants not only reaffirmed, they often sought to improve upon the communities they left behind. Many of the more positive aspects of ‘Britishness’ – responsible government, the secret ballot, universal manhood suffrage, free state education – were beamed back to Britain from its settler colonies. What propelled these exchanges? The markedly enhanced mobility of migrants from the mid century, including their increased rates of return to Britain (see p. 64), was one factor. There was also the greater facility with which migrants could stay in touch with and remain involved with family and community ‘back home’ through correspondence and remittances (see pp. 97–105), while knowledge circulated more freely through a growing body of networks that linked the British in Britain with the British overseas and carried information and ideas of all kinds between them (see pp. 78–97).
While many colonists were aware of a ‘living and enduring connection to their European beginnings’, the nationalism they espoused was based upon notions of co-operation, partnership and mutuality – notions intended to replace older forms of domination and control.38 Thus Keith Hancock (1898–1988), the first Australian elected to an All Souls Fellowship, and one of the foremost imperial historians of the inter-war era, insisted that it was ‘not impossible for Australians, nourished by a glorious literature and haunted by old memories, to be in love with two soils.’39 Hancock’s constitutional-based histories of Anglo-Dominion
37 A resurgence of migration history over the last decade or so has laid the foundations
for a thorough reappraisal of the British ‘diaspora’. Key works include E. Richards,
Britannia’s Children: Emigration from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1600
(London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), and his paper at
the British World Conference, University of Melbourne, July 2004: ‘The British
Diaspora: In Wide Angle’; M. Harper, Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish
Exodus (London: Profile Books, 2004); M. Harper and S. Constantine, Migrants and
Settlers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and P. Payton, The Cornish Overseas
(Fowey: Alexander Associates, 1999). For an analysis of the ‘diaspora’ concept, see
H. Tinker (ed.), The Diaspora of the British, Collected Seminar Papers of the Institute
of Commonwealth Studies (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1982); and
S. Constantine, ‘British Emigration to the Empire-Commonwealth since 1880: From
Overseas Settlement to Diaspora?’, in Bridge and Fedorowich, The British World,
pp. 16–35. Some historians prefer the term ‘dispersal’ as Britain’s was overwhelmingly
a voluntary movement of population, especially from the mid nineteenth century.
38 See especially here J. Eddy and D. Schreuder, ‘Introduction: Colonies into “New
Nations”’, in Eddy and Schreuder (eds.), The Rise of Colonial Nationalism (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1988), pp. 1–15 (quote from p. 6).
39 W. K. Hancock, Australia (London: Benn, 1930), p. 68.
32relations set out to show how a wider pan-British identity could be reconciled with separate statehood. Firmly of the view that dominion nationalism did not preclude a sense of belonging to a wider British community, he argued that ‘national loyalties, so far from being disruptive of the Empire, were the stuff out of which it must be re-created’.40
The idea that ‘national’ and ‘imperial’ sentiment in the dominions could be mutually reinforcing is a running theme of twentieth-century imperial historiography. As early as 1969, Carl Berger’s pioneering study of Canadian political thought presented the conflict between imperial and anti-imperial positions in Canada in terms of divergent conceptions of the colony’s history and place in the world. More specifically, Berger argued that while Canadian imperialists could embrace the empire ‘as the vehicle in which Canada would attain national status’, Canadian anti-imperialists were inclined to see all schemes for co-operation as ‘reactionary and anti-national’.41 More recently, John Darwin has revisited the Anglo-Dominion connection in order to posit a ‘composite Britannic culture’, or British ‘race’ sentiment, which was continuously reinforced by new migrants, and by a Britishcentred system of global communications transmitting news, ideas and values. Such was the purchase of this Britannic culture, Darwin argues, that as late as the 1950s it retained its capacity to reconcile national autonomy and imperial identity in the ‘old dominions’.42 Similarly, in a re-examination of the relationship between Dominion status and decolonisation, Tony Hopkins speaks of a ‘core concept of Britishness’ that continued, beyond the Second World War, to ‘give unity and vitality to a Greater Britain overseas’, and that only began to shrivel in the 1960s as the proportion of non-British immigrants increased and indigenous peoples began to assert more forcefully their equal rights with other citizens.43 Elsewhere Hopkins usefully contrasts the British diaspora of the ‘long’ nineteenth century with some of today’s migrant diasporas. As he shrewdly remarks, ‘imperial power promoted a form of cosmopolitanism that strengthened its own
40 W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, 3 vols., Vol. I: Problems of
Nationality, 1918–1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 26–41. The
quotation, originally from Richard Jebb’s Studies in Colonial Nationalism (1905) is
taken from p. 41 of Hancock’s book.
41 C. Berger, Imperialism and Nationalism, 1884–1914: A Conflict in Canadian Thought
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969).
42 J. Darwin, ‘A Third British Empire? The Dominion Idea in Imperial Politics’, in
W. R. Louis and J. Brown (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols.,
Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 64–87.
43 A. G. Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonisation’, Past & Present 200 (2008), 211–47
(pp. 215, 218–9, 228–32).
33Reconfiguring empire: the British World sense of national identity, whereas the global forces that impinge on today’s world have challenged and often weakened national institutions and identities’.44 We now need to look in more detail at how a sense of British identity was reinforced and reconfigured by the settlement of large numbers of overseas migrants in a wider British World.45 It was the New Zealandborn historian, and pioneer of the ‘new’ British history, J. G. A. Pocock, who first called for British history to be written in terms of the ‘intercultural’ story of ‘conflict and crossbreeding between societies differently based’.46 This ‘new’ British history conceived of ‘Britishness’ as a multi-ethnic identity forged across the British Isles.47 It inspired historians of empire to cast their gaze beyond the British Isles to explore how ‘Britishness’ could be a powerful motivating ideology capable, within racially defined limits, of joining people together across the settler world.
44 Hopkins, Back to the Future’, pp. 242–3.
45 There is also the separate, yet related, question of how English identities were affected
by empire; see R. J. C. Young, The Idea of English Ethnicity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007),
which argues that ‘Englishness was created for the diaspora – an ethnic identity
designed for those who were precisely not English, but rather of English descent – the
peoples of the English diaspora moving around the world: Americans, Canadians,
Australians, New Zealanders, even, at a pinch, the English working-class’ (quotation
from p. 1).
46 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History
47 (1975), 604–5. See also his essays, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In
Search of the Unknown Subject’, AHR 87 (1982), 311–36, and, more recently,
‘Conclusion: Contingency, Identity, Sovereignty’, in A. Grant and K. J. Stringer
(eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995),
pp. 292–302. Pocock delivered a plenary address at the Auckland British World
Conference (14 July 2005), ‘British History and the British World’. His conception of
British history beyond the British Isles goes back to the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and rests on the idea of an Atlantic ‘archipelago’ or ‘empire’ – British his-
tory, therefore, includes the reasons why American history ceased to be ‘British’. It
was Britain’s entry into Europe, and, in particular, its disruption of the identity of
New Zealenders (pakeha), that prompted him to consider the dominion dimensions
of Britishness. On this point, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘History and Sovereignty: The
Historiographic Response to Europeanisation in Two British cultures’, JBS 31 (1992),
358–89.
47 N. Davies, The Isles: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); H. Kearney,
The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989); K. Robbins, Nineteenth Century Britain: Integration and Diversity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), and Great Britain: Identities, Institutions and
the Idea of Britishness (Harlow: Longmans, 1998); and R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The
Making and Unmaking of a British National Identity, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1989).
Fuelled by present-day uncertainties as to what it means to be British, the volume of
publication on this subject shows no sign of letting up. See, for example, the sub-
stantial collection of essays on the relationship between the question of history and
British identity by H. Brocklehurst and R. Phillips (eds.), History, Nationhood and the
Question of Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
34If the British World was an ‘imaginary’ as well as ‘geo-political’ construct, held together not merely by political and military ties, but by a shared sense of identity,48 what precisely did being ‘British’ entail? A plurality of identities and their interconnectedness were part and parcel of the nineteenth-century British World. Shared traditions and values served for many as markers of their British identity, with loyalty to the Crown chief among these. Through royal tours, ceremonies and celebrations, the monarchy served to promote a sense of cultural identification with Britain, and acted as a powerful agent of political assimilation.49 The call of King (or Queen) and empire was most conspicuous during the Boer War and two world wars, when the British peoples rallied together and visibly demonstrated their unity. To what extent this unity was real or illusory is a moot point.50 It has been argued that these conflicts polarised opinion in dominion societies, exacerbating existing social and political divisions within them, and even sowing the seeds of the British World’s eventual unravelling.51 Others, however, insist that the intensification of dominion national consciousness resulting from the world wars did not undermine their relationship with Britain. Colonial public schools promoted and celebrated the war-time service
48 J. Darwin, ‘The Descent of Empire: Postcolonial Views of Britain’s Imperial History’,
annual guest lecture given to the Leeds Institute of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies,
University of Leeds, 4 May 2006.
49 D. Smith and P. Buckner, ‘The Canadianized Monarchy: The Invention of
Tradition? Royal Tours to Canada of 1860 and 1901’, paper given at the British
World Conference, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, 1988; P. Buckner,
‘Casting Daylight upon Magic: Deconstructing the Royal Tour of 1901 to Canada’,
JICH (2003), 158–89; B. Wellings, ‘Crown and Country: Britishness and Australian
Nationalism since 1788’, paper given at the British World Conference, University
of Melbourne, July 2004; and S. Worthy, ‘Royal Tours, Dominion Identity, and
Imperial Competition, 1900–1930’, paper given at the British World Conference,
University of Auckland, 2005. See also D. Lowry, ‘The Crown, Empire Loyalism and
the Assimilation of Non-British White Subjects in the British World: An Argument
against “Ethnic Determinism”’, in Buckner and Francis (eds.), Rediscovering the
British World, pp. 158–89.
50 For a spirited effort to unravel the complex effects of the wars on the Anglo-
Dominion relationship, in particular their role in both creating and frustrating
the impetus towards a Greater Britain, see J. Grey, ‘War and the British World in
the Twentieth Century’, in Buckner and Francis, Rediscovering the British World,
pp. 233–50.
51 The first two claims are more easily staked than the third. For the complex effects of
the world wars on dominion self-consciousness, see Bridge and Fedorowich, ‘Mapping
the British World’, p. 7; S. Constantine, ‘Britain and Empire’, in S. Constantine,
M. Kirby and M. Rose (eds.), The First World War in British History (London: Edward
Arnold, 1995), pp. 268–70; and R. Holland, ‘The British Empire and the Great
War, 1914–1918’, in Louis and Brown, Oxford History of The British Empire, Vol. IV,
pp. 125–33.
35Reconfiguring empire: the British World of their ‘old boys’.52 The nationalist sentiment of dominion officers was inextricably linked to pro-empire traditions.53 The reading matter of dominion soldiers was pro-British and frequently jingoistic.54 At the end of both world wars, there was also considerable emphasis in the dominions on their British heritage and values in the commemorative ceremonies and memorials.55 A continuing sense of attachment to Britain was likewise fostered through cultural practices and the use of language. The importation of British games and entertainments, the suppression of indigenous ones, and the ideological values that went with this process, combined as one means by which personal memories of Britain were preserved.56 So, too, was the material culture of settlers. Early generations of migrants surrounded themselves with furniture, pictures, books and other such items that reminded them of ‘home’. In fact, the very language of ‘home’ was a popular trope in settler discourse.57 English-speakers in South Africa referring to Britain as ‘home’ were roundly condemned by Afrikaners
52 J. Lambert, ‘ “Munition Factories . . . Turning Out a Constant Supply of Living
Material”: White South African Elite Boys’ Schools and the First World War’, SAHJ
51 (2004), 67–86.
53 P. H. Brennan, ‘The Other Battle: Imperialist versus Nationalist Sympathies within
the Officer Corps of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–19’, in Buckner and
Francis, Rediscovering the British World, pp. 251–65.
54 A. Laugesen, ‘Australian Soldiers and the World of Print during the Great War’, in
M. Hammond and S. Towheed (eds.), Publishing the First World War (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 93–110.
55 J. Lack and B. Zino, ‘A New Imperialism? The Imperial War Graves Commission and
the Great War’, paper given at the British World Conference, Melbourne, July 2004.
56 We are grateful to Vivian Bickford-Smith for his advice on this point. See also
B. Stoddart, ‘Sticky Wickets: Cricket, Culture and Imperialism, 1880–1960’, paper given
at the British World Conference, Institute for Commonwealth Studies, London, 1998;
A. Grundlingh, ‘ “Gone to the Dogs”. The Cultural Politics of Gambling: Rise and
Fall of British Greyhound Racing on the Witwatersrand, 1932–49’, paper presented
at the British World Conference, University of Cape Town, July 2002; T. Collins,
‘ “We Are Just as British as You Are”: Masculinity and Working-Class Imperial
Loyalty in Rugby Football’, paper given at the British World Conference, University of
Melbourne, July 2004; J. Kallinikios, ‘ “An Orgy of Britishness”: Soccer in Melbourne
in the 1950s’, paper given at the British World Conference, University of Melbourne,
July 2004; and T. Collins, ‘Rugby and the Making of Imperial Manhoods’, paper
given at the British World Conference, University of Auckland, July 2005.
57 For the example of Australia, see J. Hughes (ed.), Australian Words and Their Origins
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 259; K. S. Inglis, ‘Going Home: Australians
in England, 1870–1900’, in D. Fitzpatrick, Home Or Away? Immigrants in Colonial
Australia (Canberra: Australian National University, 1992), pp. 105–30; E. Richards,
‘Return Migration and Migrant Strategies in Colonial Australia’, in Fitzpatrick, Home
or Away?, pp. 64–104; and A. Woollacott, ‘ “All This Is the Empire, I Told Myself”:
Australian Women’s Voyages “Home” and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness’,
AHR 102 (1997), 1003–29 (pp. 1003–4).
36who took the utterance of this word as evidence of their implied disloyalty to the country.58 The use of such language was complex, however. ‘Home’ was invoked to refer to both ‘England’ and ‘Britain’, almost interchangeably, while settlers sometimes spoke of ‘home’ in the sense that it existed wherever people of English stock had chosen to settle.59 The etymology of the word, and the variety of meanings ascribed to it, merit further investigation. What is not in doubt is that the English language denoted a shared history and culture for white settlers,60 and that, for many non-white subjects, an ability to speak it provided a gateway to ‘respectability’ and ‘civilisation’.61
The picture of what it meant to be British is further complicated by the fact of a moving racial and religious frontier. The appeal of the Crown as a source of justice, and of popular constitutionalist rhetoric as a source of equal rights, ensured that, rather than being a singular doctrine, Britishness had the potential to integrate a wide variety of settler and non-settler groups. The pro-imperial identity of groups that lay beyond the core of the ‘diaspora’ has been referred to as ‘adopted’62 or ‘subaltern’63 Britishness, the idea being that those settlers who were not directly of British descent could still identify with British symbols and espouse British values, partly to carve out a niche in colonial society, and partly as a way of framing their aspirations to self-government. The pro-British sympathies of Cape Afrikaners,64 French Canadians,65 and elite Scottish and Irish Catholics66 have all been presented in these terms. In each case
58 J. Lambert, ‘ “An Unknown People”: Writing a Biography of White English-Speaking
South Africans’, unpublished article, p. 14. Copy kindly supplied by the author.
59 G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), p. 42.
60 M. Davie, Anglo-Australian Attitudes (London: Secker and Warburg, 2000), p. 7.
61 Bickford-Smith, ‘Revisiting Anglicisation in the Cape Colony’, p. 85.
62 P. Buckner and C. Bridge, ‘Reinventing the British World’, The Round Table 368
(2003), 77–88 (p. 81); Lowry, ‘The Crown, Empire Loyalism and the Assimilation of
Non-White British Subjects’, pp. 99, 102, 113–16.
63 R. Ross, ‘The Battle for Britain in the Cape Colony, 1830–60’, paper given at the
British World Conference, University of Cape Town, July 2002.
64 M. Tamarkin, Cecil Rhodes and the Cape Afrikaners: The Imperial Colossus and the
Colonial Parish Pump (London: Routledge, 1996).
65 M. Sarra-Bournet, ‘For the Empire . . . at Last: French Canadians in the Boer War’,
paper given at the British World Conference, University of Cape Town, July 2002.
66 J. Ridden, ‘Liberal Worlds: Empire, Identity and Citizenship in the Nineteenth
Century’, paper given at the British World Conference, University of Melbourne, July
2004, and ‘Britishness as an Imperial and Diasporic Identity: Irish Elite Perspectives,
c. 1820–70s’, in P. Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 88–105 (pp. 94, 104–5); and M. Murray,
‘Prayers, Ploughs and Pastures: Moidart Emigrants in the Western District of
Victoria’, paper given at the British World Conference, University of Melbourne, July
2004.
37Reconfiguring empire: the British World a ‘liberal’ and ‘loose-fitting’ form of British identity is understood to have helped these groups to maintain their cultural identity and have conferred upon them a measure of political power. Yet what of those non-white and indigenous groups seeking to negotiate for themselves a place in the British World? If Britishness was a contested identity, nowhere was this more so than in respect of the coloured communities of the settler empire.67 Demanding the rights of colonial citizenship, a variety of indigenous groups – Australian Aborigines,68 Maori,69 Cape Coloureds70 and Natal Indians71 – affirmed their belief in Victorian notions of free wage labour, secure property rights, equality before the law and a non-racial franchise. Some appealed directly to the Crown for help in their dealings with labour- and land-hungry settlers, in the hope of securing greater political representation. For the most part, however, they were turned away empty-handed, learning through bitter experience that their imperial loyalty was a one-way street. The language of ‘betrayal’ was never far from the lips of the British World’s indigenous peoples, therefore, particularly among those who protested their imperial loyalty.72
67 For Britishness as disputed racial territory, see D. Lorimer, ‘From Victorian Values
to White Virtues: Assimilation and Exclusion in British Racial Discourse, c. 1870–
1914’, in Buckner and Francis, Rediscovering the British World, pp. 109–34.
68 R. Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance, 1788–1980
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 166, and Aboriginal Victorians: A History since
1800 (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2005). See also C. Morgan, ‘Creating
Transatlantic Worlds? Aboriginal Peoples in Britain, 1830s–1870s’, paper given at the
British World Conference, Auckland, July 2005.
69 M. Treagus, ‘Spectacles of Empire: Maori Tours of England in 1863 and 1911’,
paper given at the British World Conference, University of Melbourne, July 2004.
See also A. Ballara, Iwi: The Dynamics of Maori Tribal Organisation from c. 1769 to
c. 1945 (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1998), p. 308; L. Cox, Kotahitanga: The
Search for Maori Political Unity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 57–8,
and P. Te H. Jones, King Potatau: An Account of the Life of Potatau Te Wherowhero, the
First Maori King (Wellington: Polynesian Society of New Zealand, 1960), p. 160.
70 M. Adhikari, ‘Ambiguity, Assimilationism and Anglophilism in South Africa’s
Coloured Community: The Case of Piet Uithalder’s Satirical Writings, 1909–22’,
SAHJ 47 (2002), 115–31, and ‘ “Give us the Benefit of Our British Blood”: Changing
Perceptions of Coloured Identity in South Africa’, paper given at the British World
Conference, University of Auckland, July 2005. See also P. Limb, ‘The Ambiguities
of British Empire Loyalism and Identities in the Politics and Journalism of Early
ANC Leaders’, paper given at the British World Conference, Cape Town, 2002.
71 G. Vahed, ‘Race, Class and Loyalty to Empire: Durban’s Indians during the First
World War’, paper given to the British World Conference, University of Cape Town,
July 2002.
72 A. S. Thompson, ‘The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c. 1870–1939’,
English Historical Review 118 (2003), 617–50 (pp. 638–9, 648–50). For the ambigu-
ities of African ‘loyalty’, see J. Starfield, ‘A Dance with the Empire: Modiri Molema’s
Glasgow Years, 1914–21’, JSAS 27 (2001), 479–503.