The British Empire was the largest empire the world has ever seen, and as such, has significantly impacted many of the countries it formerly held as colonies. Imposing a Western style of governance would change the political operations of a nation and would fundamentally shift power dynamics within the country. Through a review of the existing literature on the subject, this thesis examines the effects that British imperial rule had on four different countries in both their social and economic development in the post-colonial era. Overall, the results indicate that Britain failed to set their colonies up for long-term development and success, instead creating a culture of dependency that would maintain the global balance of power. However, these impacts were much harsher in majority-minority countries and disproportionately affected marginalised populations around the world.

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In this essay Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901) is dealt with from a postcolonial perspective, and the aim is to show how three father figures - Colonel Creighton, Mahbub Ali and the lama - individually influence Kim’s education. Furthermore, how their point of view on education and parenting can be used to understand the larger concepts of postcolonialism and the pedagogy of Empire. This essay will argue that Kipling provides three different approaches to education that each can be considered the most suitable for a white orphan in British India during the late nineteenth century. Colonel Creighton is the personification of the imperial mindset, an authoritarian leader who strongly believes in institutions such as schools. Whereas Mahbub Ali, the wild horse from beyond the border and a servant of the Great Game, advocates freedom and a non-institutionalised form of education. Last but not least, the Buddhist lama from Tibet wishes to make Kim his chela and teach him the Wheel of Life. Reading Kipling’s novel Kim helps us to create an awareness of how the world order has changed during the decades and also gives us the opportunity to look at our present time in different lights.

This thesis examines the representation of the settler societies of the British Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa were represented as a distinct part of the Empire, united by the idea that these parts of the Empire were ‘more British’ than the rest, and, had a shared heritage and culture and a predominant British settler population. It was represented as a landscape of opportunity built on layers of representations in the sources of the period from advertisements and panoramas to travel accounts and emigration literature. The settler societies were represented as a ‘Greater Britain’ or ‘Better Britains’, an imagining of the settler societies based on what the British wanted for themselves rather than as a true representation of four parts of the Empire. The notion of ‘Better Britains’ delves into British ideas of their past, present and future. If they were ‘better’, what were they improving on? What qualities and aspects of society were included and excluded? It was an idealised image but also flexible, a malleable landscape where the British could live out desires. Opportunity was found in the land, resources and climate, but also within the modernity of the cities and ideas of social advancement and of the freedom of the frontier.

This thesis analyses the works of Sir John Malcolm (1769-1833) as key texts in the intellectual history of the formation of British India. It is concerned less with Malcolm's widely acknowledged role as a leading East India Company administrator and more with the unparalleled range of influential books that he wrote on imperial and Asian topics between 1810 and his death in 1833. Through the publication of nine major works, numerous pamphlets and articles and a few volumes of poetry, Malcolm established his reputation as an authority in three major areas. Firstly, the Sketch of the Political History of India (1811) and the posthumously published Life of Robert Lord Clive (1836) remained major sources on the history of the founding of the British empire in India for much of the nineteenth century. Through these histories, he wove the anxieties of the Company's solider-diplomats of the early nineteenth into the narrative of the Company's rise as an imperial power. With the History of the Sikhs (1810) and, to a far greater extent, the History of Persia (1815), Malcolm sealed his reputation as a path-finding orientalist making an early contribution to European knowledge of India's north-west frontier. Lastly, Malcolm's Memoir of Central India (1823), which analysed the history of the region from the rise of the Marathas to the British conquest in 1818, is one of the most sophisticated and politically significant examples of British efforts to construct an Indian past that accounted for British imperial control in the present. This study's detailed examination of his works provides an invaluable insight into how British imperial mentalities in the period before 1857 were shaped by the interplay between trends and events in India and Britain on the one hand and the competing historiographical and political traditions current among British imperial administrators on the other. It demonstrates that British thinking on India was far from unified and was often characterised less by a desire to formulate an ideology for rule – even if this was its eventual effect – and more by bitter divisions between imperial administrators. Malcolm's need to counter the arguments of his opponents among the Court of Directors in the decade after Governor General Wellesley's departure in 1806 and his resistance to more radical commentators on India like James Mill in the 1820s, shaped his writing. Malcolm's influence and the range of topics he wrote about make him an ideologue of empire and a pioneer of British orientalism and the historiography of British India. Malcolm's body of works is the most comprehensive and prominent example of how the British responded intellectually to their empire in India in the generation after the Trial of Warren Hastings and before the first Anglo-Afghan war.

This thesis is a family history of Silas Molema and his three children from the late 1880s to the late 1920s. The Molemas were a family of devout Methodists and educated chiefs in Mafikeng north of British Bechuanaland (part of the Cape colony in 1895) but they held extensive landholdings across the border in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The thesis explores education, landholding and political office as strategies through which the Molemas attempted to maintain their position of class, status and power. Chiefs perceived formal annexation by Britain in 1885 also as opportunity to pursue greater self-determination, preserve the institutions of chiefly rule, and sustain respectable livelihoods. These aspirations had come to be experienced and understood as sechuana, which was a fluid reconstruction of tradition that helped Molemas and other Bechuana notables straddle incongruous cultural spheres along a racially and ethnically diverse colonial frontier. The thesis argues that nationhood was a key identification through which Molemas and other educated Bechuana saw themselves, and considers why they imagined their nation within the British Empire. The thesis also points to the various historical transformations and private entanglements that enmeshed various conceptions of nationhood into the everyday experience of the family as an emotive and socialising institution. These sentiments of nationhood profoundly shaped this family’s self-understanding, and mediated the choices children made about work, marriage and other significant relationships. The challenge to transfer inherited privilege across generations shaped identities, intersected with the reconfiguration of the local political economy, and impinged upon structural transformations in southern Africa.

Cette thèse étudie la généalogie des représentations culturelles britanniques du Moyen-Orient des années 1850 au début de la Première Guerre mondiale. Nos sources comprendront des tirages photographiques, des récits de voyages et d’exploration, des cartes, des documents topographiques, des archives privées, des articles de presse, des débats parlementaires, des essais, des romans et des documents officiels. À grande échelle, une perspective globale nous permettra d’étudier la construction cartographique de cette partie de l’Orient qui fut baptisée « Moyen-Orient ». Nous démontrerons comment les acteurs de la politique extérieure britannique élaborèrent cette région. À petite échelle, une micro-histoire nous amènera à hauteur d’homme auprès de figures de l’action britannique dans ces territoires de l’Orient, entre Inde et Afrique. Par une étude approfondie de leurs représentations, nous démontrerons que le regard britannique sur cette partie du monde fut pluriel et qu’il évolua considérablement sur quelques décennies. Nous chercherons à établir cette chronologie. Nous relierons aussi les constructions de l’Orient aux idéaux de la société britannique contemporaine, notamment à travers la photographie de ces territoires et leur exploration archéologique. Il nous faudra par ailleurs questionner le rôle des prémisses de la culture de masse dans le dessin des contours de ce territoire éloigné. Le problème de la nature impériale des rapports entre la Grande-Bretagne et le Moyen-Orient en cours d’élaboration nous amènera à souligner le caractère polycentrique et contradictoire des expressions de l’influence britannique sur la région. / This dissertation explores the genealogy of the cultural representations of the Middle-East from the 1850’s to the beginning of the First World War. To this end, I will analyze a wide range of documents. My primary sources will include photographic prints, travelogues, maps, topographical documents, private papers, press articles, parliamentary debates, essays, novels and official papers. On a large scale, an overall perspective will enable me to study the cartographic manufacture of the part of the Orient that was christened « Middle East ». I will assess to what extent the actors of British foreign policy gradually drew this region. On a much smaller scale, a micro-history will bring me at man's height, close to figures of British involvement in these territories, in-between India and Africa. By way of careful study of their representations, I will demonstrate that the British gaze on this part of the world was far from being hieratic and that it evolved within the span of a few decades. I will look to specify this chronology. I will also establish links between these constructions of the East and the ideals of contemporary British society, especially through the study of photographic representation of these territories, as well as the analysis of their archaeological exploration. I will have to question the part played by early mass culture in designing this distant territory. The issue raised by the potential imperial nature of British involvement in this Middle-East to be will call for an appraisal of the polycentric and contradicting expressions of British influence in the region.

This dissertation explores the correlation between British colonial experiences in Ireland and India c. 1650 - 1800. While the traditional characterisation of Ireland as a settlement colony and India as primarily a mercantile colony would suggest diverse imperial encounters, a comparative analysis of the two shows significant similarities. Temporal and/or geographical distances notwithstanding, the study's thematic approach reveals recurring patterns regarding the relationships between colonisers and the colonised. The six chapters of this dissertation explore different elements of empire, concluding that comparable socio-political and agrarian principles were consistently implemented in both colonies. The first chapter explores history writing as a tool of historical appropriation and indigenous reconfiguration. The second looks at escalating legal responses to colonial violence and colonial jurisdiction's role in defining social norms; the third considers the evolving forms of punishment dealt to 'deviant' colonial subjects. The fourth chapter looks at similar processes of agrarian reconfiguration that revealed broader imperial attitudes towards landownership and the fifth one elaborates on the use of visual representations of empire as propaganda tools to shape public opinion. In the final chapter, selected experiences of the Irish in India illustrate examples of colonial subjects' collaboration in imperial expansion. By adopting a more heuristic and thematic approach to colonial experiences, this study adds to the growing literature that necessarily complicates the distinctions between metropole and periphery. It challenges the use of single points of reference which have routinely privileged the accounts and experiences of Britons in the scholarly analysis of cross-cultural and imperial interactions. Blending early modern and nineteenth-century experiences with regional and global history, the chapters address the history of emotions, law, material culture, economy, and politics to argue that processes of influence and transformation were indicative of a more layered and evolutionary development in response to colonial challenges. Such experimental approaches provide a more sustained understanding of the processes of continuity and change in Britain's imperial evolution.