During the nineteenth century, defence was a major issue in Victoria and Australia, as indeed it was in other British colonies and the United Kingdom. Considerable pressure was brought to bear by London on the self-governing colonies to help provide for their own defence against internal unrest and also possible invasions or incursions by nations such as France, Russia and the United States. / From 1851 until defence was handed over to the new Australian Commonwealth at Federation in 1901, the Victorian colonial government spent considerable energy and money fortifying parts of Port Phillip Bay and the western coastline as well as developing the first colonial navy within the British Empire. Citizens were invited to form volunteer corps in their local areas as a second tier of defence behind the Imperial troops stationed in Victoria. When the garrison of Imperial troops was withdrawn in 1870, these units of amateur citizen soldiers formed the basis of the colony’s defence force. Following years of indecision, ineptitude and ad hoc defence planning that had left the colony virtually defenceless, in 1883 Victoria finally adopted a professional approach to defending the colony. The new scheme of defence allowed for a complete re-organisation of not only the colony’s existing naval and military forces, but also the command structure and supporting services. For the first time an integrated defence scheme was established that co-ordinated the fixed defences (forts, batteries minefields) with the land and naval forces. Other original and unique aspects of the scheme included the appointment of the first Minister of Defence in the Australian colonies and the first colonial Council of Defence to oversee the joint defence program. All of this was achieved under the guidance of Imperial advisors who sought to integrate the colony’s defences into the wider Imperial context. / This thesis seeks to analyse Victoria’s colonial defence scheme on a number of levels – firstly, the nature of the final defence scheme that was finally adopted in 1883 after years of vacillation, secondly, the effectiveness of the scheme in defending Victoria, thirdly, how the scheme linked to the greater Australasian and Imperial defence, and finally the political, economic, social and technological factors that shaped defence in Victoria during the second half of the nineteenth century.

This dissertation examines the era of slavery amelioration while situating the significance of this project to reform slavery within the longer history of the British Empire. While scholars of British slavery have long debated the causes of both the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and the abolition of slavery (1833), they have overlooked the ways that both abolitionists and politicians attempted to "reform" slavery - extending both baseline protections and a civilizing mission toward slaves - as a prelude toward broader emancipation. This attempted amelioration of slavery influenced both the timing and form that emancipation took. By focusing on the island where metropolitan officials first attempted to exert an ameliorative agenda, this dissertation uncovers the forgotten influence of Spanish laws and practices on British abolitionism. Trinidad was captured from Spain in 1797 during the heyday of abolitionist agitation, during an era when Spanish slave codes were gaining newfound attention among British reformers for their reputed benevolence. Despite local planter opposition, metropolitan officials elected to retain the island's Spanish legal structure following the Peace of Amiens. The Trinidad template for amelioration would be framed around the island's Spanish laws, notably the office of Protector of Slaves. This individual was imagined as an intermediary between master and slave, metropole and colony, epitomizing an attempt to infuse the slave regime with a modicum of imperial regulation. The ideas behind amelioration survived the abolition of slavery. After Caribbean slavery was abolished between 1833 and 1838, the reforms that had been attempted in Trinidad and elsewhere over the previous decades came to inform the regulation of labor relationships, particularly immigrant labor, following in its wake. The process of negotiating reform - of slavery, indentured labor, and relations with indigenous peoples - had taught Colonial Office officials to distrust the instincts and activities of white colonial subjects. The Protector model proliferated in contexts of continued distrust during an era when metropolitan officials remained reluctant to exert more direct authority than necessary. This model would break down only in the wake of repeated failure. Until then, metropolitan officials hoped that local watchdogs would "protect" nonwhite and laboring subjects from abuse. / History

No description available.

This thesis brings together two important developments in contemporary geography; firstly, the recognition of the need to write critical histories of geographical thought and, particularly, the relationship between modern geography and European imperialism, and secondly, the attempt by feminist geographers to countervail the absence of women in these histories. Drawing on recent innovative attempts by geographers to construct alternative, contextual perspectives in (re)writing histories of geographical thought, the thesis analyzes the travel narratives of British women travellers in West Africa between 1840 and 1915. Recent attempts by feminists to include women in histories of geography and imperialism have, all too often, failed to analyze critically the role of women in imperial culture, or have reproduced gender dichotomies in their analysis. This thesis seeks to overcome these problems in three ways. Firstly, it explores the contributions of women travellers to imperial culture, primarily through their production of popular geographies. Secondly, it analyzes the ways in which these women were empowered in the imperial context by virtue of both race and class. Thirdly, it frames the accounts of each woman within the specific spatial and temporal context of their journeys in order to explore the complexities in the popular geographies they produced. The thesis illustrates that while gender was an important factor in the construction of images in the travel narratives of Victorian women travellers, this cannot be divorced from the wider context of their journey, nor from other elements in power relations based on difference such as race and class. Using this framework, the study explores in detail the production of popular geographies of the landscapes and peoples of West Africa by British women travellers, and formulates an argument on how women and their experiences can be included in histories of geographical thought.

From 1884 to 1885 the British were first engaged with the Mahdist forces of Sudan in an effort to first rescue the inhabitants of Khartuom, and later to rescue the rescuer Charles “Chinese” Gordon. The affair played out both in Parliament and the newspapers as journalists became the cheerleaders for Empire. My thesis focuses on Britain’s 1884-1890 Sudan Campaign through print culture using political debates, journalism, literature, memoirs, and art. I show how the activism of the press and the romanticism of the larger media reinforced ideas about imperialism and the British role within the Empire at large.

Thesis advisor: Alan Richardson / The Romantic period encompasses a pivotal set of decades for the development of British citizenship, a fact that has been underemphasized due to narrow definitions of what citizenship entails. Within the wide discursive arena of national identity in Romantic fiction, however, specific literary tropes and figures emerge that consolidate and challenge the nascent and evolving concept of the British citizen. The figure of the wanderer or stateless being explores a mode of national belonging that is increasingly untethered to land and nativity; tropes of the virtual and disembodiment become central to articulations of political and bureaucratic citizenship in the American revolutionary context; struggles between dependence and independence in sentimental plots of courtship and marriage narrate the citizenly potential of women in the context of couverture; and portrayals of repatriation and exile illuminate how Britain was coming to terms with its population of color in the early post-abolition era. Taken together, the literary texts under discussion here intervene in the emergence of a ‘Romantic’ citizenship discourse in the English-speaking North Atlantic World. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

No description available.

Following the first world exhibition, the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, exhibitions became routine events across the West that merged both education and entertainment to forward political and economic goals. For the most part scholars have taken the frequency, popularity, and propagandistic efforts of exhibitions at face value, viewing them as successful reassertions of the imperial, industrial, and technological superiority of Western nation-states. Though offering valuable insights into the cultural technologies of imperial rule, these works miss the complexities of imperial projects within specific temporal and geographical contexts. This manuscript traces the historical dynamics of India at exhibitions held in London during and after imperial rule: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition, the 1924-25 British Empire Exhibition, and the 1951 Festival of Britain. In historicizing the exhibitionary administration and display of India over time, this study argues for a more complex reading of exhibitions in which displays invoked a mélange of meanings that destabilized as well as projected imperial hierarchies. It also examines the ways in which Indians administered, evaluated, and contested imperial displays. Rather than seamlessly reinforcing imperial dominance, exhibitions, located within specific historical contexts, emerged as contested, multifaceted, and even ambiguous portrayals of empires.

This thesis examines the connection between participation in the British empire and constructions of Scottish national identity, through investigating the activities of civil society organisations in Scotland, in particular missionary societies and the Presbyterian churches in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Though empire is commonly thought to have had a significant impact on Scots' adoption of a British identity. The process of how representations of empire were transmitted and understood at home has been little explored. Similarly, religion is thought to have played an important role in supporting a sense of Scottish identity. but this theme has also been little explored. This thesis, then, examines evidence of civil society activity related to empire, including philanthropic and religious, learned and scientific, and imperial propagandist activities. In order to elucidate how empire was understood at home through the engagement with empire by civil society organisations. Of these forms of organisation. missionary societies and the churches were the most important in mediating an understanding of empire. The pattern of the growth and development of the movement in support of foreign missions is described and analysed, indicating its longevity, its typical functions and membership, and demonstrating both its middle class leadership and the active participation of women. Analysis of missionar) literature of a variety of types shows that dominant discourses of religion, race. gender and class produced iconic representations of the missionary experience which reflected the values of middle class Scots. The analysis also demonstrates both that representations of Scottish national identity were privileged over those of a British identity, but that these were complementary rather than being seen as in opposition to each other. Through examining the public profile of the missionary enterprise in the secular press it is shown that these representations were appropriated in the secular sphere to represent a specific Scottish contribution to empire. The thesis concludes that the missionary experience of empire. embedded as it was in the institutional life of the Presbyterian churches, had the capacity to generate representations and symbols of Scottish national identity which were widely endorsed in both religious and secular spheres in the age of high imperialism.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine Franklin D. Roosevelt's role as an anti-colonialist and his plan for a post-war world. Roosevelt believed that colonialism was the cause of hatred, discontent and war. With this in mind, he pursued an anti-colonial policy against the British and French empires, to him, the mainstay of colonial power.