This thesis considers the relationships between photography and geography in the wider context of British imperialism, c. 1840-1914. It distisses reproductions of sixty photographs. Chapter one situates this research within current theoretical debates concerning the histories of photography, geography and British imperialism. It also discusses the sources used, and provides a detailed outline of the thesis. Chapter two considers the photographic representation of landscape on geographical expeditions, particularly scientific expeditions in central Africa and the travels of commercial photographers in northern India. Chapter three focuses on the role of photography within military campaigns. A detailed discussion of the Abyssinian campaign (1867-8) reveals how photography and geography were associated in imperial campaigning. Chapter four traces the language and imagery of 'photographic-hunting'. A discussion of practices of hunting, exploration and conservation, particularly in Africa, shows how photography was a means of representing the imperial domination of the natural world. Chapter five explores the photographic survey and classification of 'racial types'. It situates the associated uses of photography in anthropology and geography within the context of Victorian scientific ideas on race, both within the empire and in Britain itself. Chapter six discusses the relationship between the representation of racial 'types' abroad and the social 'others' of Victorian London. It presents a case study of the work of the professional photographer John Thomson, placing his work in China and London in the context of his ethnological and geographical interests. Chapter seven explores Halford Mackinder's work with the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee, 1902-1911. It shows how photography was used to promote an imperial vision of geography, but raises also questions as to its ultimate impact. Chapter eight provides a conclusion which argues that photography was central to the construction of imaginative geographies of empire in the period 1840-1914 and suggests that, through photography, such geographies continue to be reproduced today

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries the kingdom of Buganda in East Africa endured rapid changes which threatened its autonomy and power, including repeated civil wars, conversion Christianity, and the gradual transition to British colonial rule under the Uganda Protectorate. Apolo Kagwa (1864-1927) played important roles throughout, serving as prime minister and then as regent to two Bugandan kings, while also being knighted by the British. Kagwa needs to be recognized for his creative work in adapting politics and culture to protect and preserve the integrity and future of Buganda; this new biography informed by recent historical scholarship advances this. Pursuing his own interests, but also those of the kingdom, he mediated political and cultural change with the intent of renovating Buganda, heeding local politics while adeptly anticipating and manipulating British interests in the region, to help prepare and secure Buganda for the colonial period.

This thesis aims to provide a historical study of colonialism and coloniality in the period 1900-2003 through a comparison of the British invasion of Iraq at the start of the 1900s and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 in order to identify continuities as well as changes. The study employs a comparative research method in order to demonstrate that there were significant similarities between the two invasions. However, comparing two colonial invasions in the same country in different time periods also has the potential to reveal significant changes over time in colonial strategies. The thesis compares the two invasions in terms of Quijano’s four spheres of the colonial matrix of power, namely the struggle for control of authority, the struggle for economic control, the struggle for hegemony of information and the transformation of gender relations. The thesis will demonstrate that the colonial strategies adopted by both imperial powers were strikingly similar. Moreover, the thesis will argue that these similarities were part of a continuation of a colonial system since many of the structures that were established by the British, such as tribalisation within an imposed nation-state, have remained in place and were reinforced by the U.S. Additionally, the same ways of seeing and representing colonised peoples that were present during the British invasion, were used to justify the American invasion. Every sphere of both invasions was thoroughly gendered. Not only did colonial invasions effect gender relations in Iraq considerably, but the ideologies used to justify the invasions were also based on gendered assumptions. Finally, in accordance with decolonial theory, the thesis calls for “a declaration of war against naturalised war." / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Historical and Heritage Studies / MSocSci / Unrestricted

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This study examines the relationship between British perceptions and policies regarding India’s North-West Frontier and its Pathan inhabitants and the decline of British power in the subcontinent from 1919 to 1947. Its central argument is that two key constituencies within the framework of British India, the officers of the Indian Army and the Indian Political Service, viewed the Frontier as the most crucial region within Britain’s Indian Empire. Generations of British officers believed that this was the one place in India where the British could suffer a “knockout blow” from either external invasion or internal revolt. In light of this, when confronted by a full-scale Indian nationalist movement after the First World War, the British sought to seal off the Frontier from the rest of India. Confident that they had inoculated the Frontier against nationalism, the British administration on the Frontier carried on as if it were 30 years earlier, fretting about possible Soviet expansion, tribal raids, and Afghan intrigues. This emphasis on external menaces proved costly, however, as it blinded the British to local discontent and the rapid growth of a Frontier nationalist movement by the end of the 1920s. When the Frontier administration belatedly realized that they faced a homegrown nationalist movement they responded with a combination of institutional paralysis and brutality that underscored the British belief that the region constituted the primary bulwark of the British Raj. This violence proved counterproductive. It engendered wide-scale nationalist interest in the Frontier and effectively made British policy in the region a subject of All-Indian political debate. The British responded to mounting nationalist pressure in the 1930s by placing the Frontier at the center of their successful efforts to retain control of India’s defence establishment. This was a short-lived stopgap, however. By the last decade of British rule much of the Frontier was under the administration of the Indian National Congress. Moreover, the British not only concluded that Indian public opinion must be taken into account when formulating policy, but that nationalist prescriptions for the “problem” of the North-West Frontier should be enacted. / text

Bridges, railways stations, warehouses, bandstands, fountains, shop fronts, lamps, gates and other cast-iron elements can still be found throughout Argentina. Some of these elements are impressive, others humble; some are abandoned, others are still in use. Many are part of important monuments; others are so incorporated into the urban landscape that they almost go unnoticed. When one's attention is drawn to these features, however, a company nameplate and place of origin - 'London', 'Liverpool', 'Glasgow' - is usually visible. These elements are so far from Argentina that their appearance begs several questions: why are most of the visible nameplates British? Are they the same as those found in London, Liverpool and Glasgow, or in former British colonies like India, South Africa or Australia? If so, why? Can we think of these elements as British imperial architecture in Argentina? In what context can their arrival in Argentina be understood? Who commissioned and designed them? Are there more Scottish nameplates than English, or any other? Does it matter? Did these elements act as models that were later copied or imitated by local manufacturers? Did they affect architecture and urban development in Argentina? If architecture reflects the view of a society, what do these elements reflect? Considering the wider context of British cast iron manufacturing, this dissertation asks what role Scotland's burgeoning cast iron industry played in the export of British iron products to Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If in recent years historians have reconsidered the specific contributions of Scotland and its people to the growth and expansion of Great Britain as an imperial power, this dissertation takes this analysis into the realm of cast iron as an export industry. If British cast iron was ubiquitous throughout the developed world during this period, how do we begin to understand the Scottish cast iron industry as a major contributor to this trade? Here Argentina is used as a micro-study in an attempt to measure and understand that contribution. In addressing some of the above questions, the dissertation attempts to form a coherent analysis of the architectural, historic, cultural and economic dimensions of the phenomenon of Scottish architectural ironwork in Argentina. In so doing, the study hopes to shed light on larger questions concerning British 'informal' imperialism, considering exports of cast iron as a significant component in Britain's attempts at economic leverage and coercion in Argentina during that country's most dramatic period of development and urbanisation. The dissertation arrives at the conclusion that British cast-iron elements found in Argentina are the same or similar to elements found in Great Britain and its colonial empire because they arrived in Argentina through a process of commercial expansion that involved imperial trade routes, global networks, cooperation between British architects and engineers, as well as migration and the assistance of the pro-British elite in Argentina. It is argued that British iron in general, and Scottish in particular, contributed to the expansion of British power and influence in the region through helping shape the architectural and urban environments of Argentina. To reach this conclusion, the thesis is structured in three sections dealing with the three most significant aspects of the thesis: informal empire in Argentina, the iron trade, and Scottish cast-iron architecture in Argentina.

This thesis offers a three-pronged perspective on the historical interconnections between Lowland Scots language(s) and British imperialism. Through analyses of the manifestation of Scots linguistic varieties outwith Scotland during the nineteenth century, alongside Scottish concerns for maintaining the socio-linguistic “propriety” and literary “standards” of “English,” this discussion argues that certain elements within Lowland language were employed in projecting a sentimental-yet celebratory conception of Scottish imperial prestige. Part I directly engages with nineteenth-century “diasporic” articulations of Lowland Scots forms, focusing on a triumphal, ceremonial vocalisation of Scottish shibboleths, termed “verbal tartanry.” Much like physical emblems of nineteenth-century Scottish iconography, it is suggested that a verbal tartanry served to accentuate Scots distinction within a broader British framework, tied to a wider imperial superiorism. Parts II and III look to the origins of this verbal tartanry. Part II turns back to mid eighteenth-century Scottish linguistic concerns, suggesting the emergence of a proto-typical verbal tartanry through earlier anxieties to ascertain “correct” English “standards,” and the parallel drive to perceive, prohibit, and prescribe Scottish linguistic usage. It is argued that later eighteenth-century Scottish philological priorities for the roots and “purity” of Lowland Scots forms – linked to “ancient” literature and “racially”-loaded origin myths – led to an encouraged “uncovering” of hallowed linguistic traits. This renegotiated reverence for certain Lowland forms was bolstered by contemporary “diasporic” imaginings – envisioning, indeed pre-empting the significance of Scots migrants in the sentimental preservation of a seemingly-threatened linguistic distinction. Part III looks beyond Scotland in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Through a consideration of the markedly different colonial and “post-colonial” contexts of British India and the early American Republic, attitudes towards certain, distinctive Lowland forms, together with Scots' assertions of English linguistic “standards,” demonstrate a Scottish socio-cultural alignment with British imperial prestige.

The grant of the diwani to the East India Company in August 1765 represents a climacteric moment in British imperial histories. Vested by the Mughal Emperor Shah Allam II, this newfound right to collect revenue saddled the Company with the broader and formal economic, judicial and military responsibilities of a territorial empire. Wherefore, in the era of post-Mughal political splintering, the EIC, as an emerging subcontinental state had to contend with internal revolts abetted by ethno-religious and socio-economic crises, but also because of threats posed by the Kingdom of Mysore and the Maratha Confederacy. Nevertheless, in the midst of the American Revolution, the EIC’s contentious and contested conduct of imperial governance in India became an ideological, philosophical and pragmatic point of domestic and imperial contention. Thus, confronted with the simultaneous internal and external implications of the crises of Empire between 1765 and 1788, the role of the Company’s fiscal-military administration and exercise of violence within the spheres British imperial governance was reconceptualised and in doing so contemporaries underwrote the emergence of what historians have subsequently called the ‘Second British Empire’ in India. Alternatively, the reconceptualisation of the EIC’s fiscal-military administration served to ensure the continuity and preservation of the British imperial nexus as it was imposed upon Bengal. This work, therefore, traces the Company’s fiscal-military administration and dispensation of violence during the ‘crises of empire’ as a point of genesis in the development and reformation of British imperial governance. Moreover, it will show that the interdependent nature of the Company’s ‘fiscal-military hybridity’ ultimately came to underwrite further the ideological, philosophical and pragmatic consolidation of imperial governance in ‘British India’. Accordingly, this dissertation examines the interdependent role between Parliament’s reconceptualisation of the East India Company’s fiscal-military administration of violence and the changing nature of British imperial governance in ‘British India’.

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Late nineteenth-century Victorian adventure novels offer a complex depiction of manhood in relation to colonial adversaries. H. Rider Haggard's 1880s novels portray imperial adventure as an opportunity for masculine rejuvenation, while later adventure novels express a sense of imperial dread and suggest that adventure traumatizes, instead of rejuvenates, masculinity. All of these novels offer insight into a larger shift in Victorian thought concerning Britain's role as an imperial power. The novels define masculinity in two distinct ways: as modern and as medieval. Each novel approaches modern manhood as impotent when faced with the colonial threat, but the narratives all offers a different interpretation of medieval masculinity, underscoring the vexed nature of the Victorian's relationship with the past. H. Rider Haggard's novels, King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), suggest that imperial adventure offers modern manhood rejuvenation and purpose through interaction and eventual suppression of the colonial female. Haggard offers an optimistic portrayal of adventure because of both the men's distinctly medieval form of physical rejuvenation and the men's ability to influence the landscape in their favor. Authors Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh present a vastly different interpretation of empire and medieval masculinity in their 1897 novels Dracula and The Beetle. Adventure traumatizes the men in the later novels, and their hysteria attests to their effeminate lack of masculine virility. The 1897 novels critique both the optimistic depiction of imperial adventure and the unnatural reliance on medieval forms of masculinity offered in novels such as Haggard's.