From ‘Imperial Federation’ to ‘British Commonwealth’: The Evolution of the Rhetoric of Imperial Unity, 1910–1921

THEN PRIME MINISTER Curtin declared that Australia depended on the United States for its defense in the face of Japanese invasion, many people jumped to the conclusion that the dissolution of the British Commonwealth was at hand. 'When he proposed a supreme consultative body for Empire problems, which should meet regularly, and have a permanent secretariat, an equal number interpreted it to mean Imperial Federation. But the one reaction is as far from the mark as the other. The truth is that Mr. Curtin is feeling his way towards a middle-of-the-road type of Commonwealth relation which will coincide with realities. The search for satisfactory means to reconcile the freedom of decision and action of the individual parts of the Commonwealth with the planning and execution of a united policy in regard to such overriding needs as security has been constant since the self-governing units of the Empire grew to maturity. In practice, Britain continued to provide through the Navy the basic means for protection of the Empire thereby sparing the Dominions heavy defense expenditures, and in moments of danger, a virtually united front developed. This empirical solution was accepted in default of other arrangements which could command general consent. But it has not been without criticisms and proposed alternatives in the past as well as in the present. The two major criticisms of Commonwealth arrangements voiced in the past are those which have been reinforced by recent events. On the one side, it was argued that the Commonwealth has failed to reap the chief benefits of collaboration because its integration of effort came only in time to meet but not to prevent danger. The other side has maintained that there is no real freedom of action for the Dominions if the Commonwealth stands together in moments of crisis behind a foreign policy which is largely if not entirely the creation of its strongest member, Great Britain. Each group of critics had its own solution. The first preached Imperial Federation with the same fervor and much the same arguments as Clarence Streit has used in support of Federal Union. But the movement foundered before World War I on the jealously guarded autonomy of the larger Dominions. The second group found its hope in the principles of the League Covenant as a guide for the foreign policy of all the members of the Commonwealth. But what in theory offered an easy way out of the dilemma, in practice merely meant that the problem was writ large. Collective security proved neither

Assume the Globe:Tennyson's Jubilee Ode and the Institutions of Imperialism Cornelia Pearsall (bio) [L]eft to itself all power tends ultimately to construct a chimeric coherence for itself—with its fixations, its archaic landscapes, its arbitrary importance, and its pathological forms. Achille Mbembe, "Thinking, in Lightning and Thunder" The world has not yet seen an 'Imperial Institute' and no one appears yet to know precisely what it is for," observed a reviewer in The British Architect, assessing the six finalists in a design competition for a building to commemorate the 1887 Jubilee of Queen Victoria. Lacking clarity about the intentions of the Imperial Institute of the United Kingdom, the Colonies, and India (its full title), "[e]ach architect seems to have had to fancy for himself the sort of thing an Imperial Institute should be." This impression of confusion, or indeed absence, of purpose leads the author to suggest a startling analogy: "it seems very much like asking six Palaeontologists to furnish plans and elevations for a dodo, without supplying them with bones to evolve it from."1 The dodo, a flightless bird native to Mauritius that had gone extinct by the late seventeenth century, less than a century after its first recorded sighting by Dutch sailors, was for Victorian Britain a figure for failure of a potentially comical sort.2 Even had the imagined paleontologists possessed sufficient fossil evidence, to reverse engineer a dodo is to construct an organism marked from inception for extinction, to design for disappearance. Form could not follow function in the "plans and elevations" for the Imperial Institute, which had been proposed by the Prince of Wales; thus, dysfunction was built into the structure from its foundation. "Already a failure" was the prescient verdict of Thomas H. Huxley, a major proponent of Darwinian evolutionary theory who was an avid early supporter but soon an embittered detractor of the Imperial Institute. Before the building had begun to take material shape, he declared it destined "to become eventually a ghost [End Page 177] like the Albert Hall or revive as a tea garden" (Sheppard, p. 222). It became the latter before it became the former—one of various bathetic trajectories this essay traces—but this prediction had already found correlative voicing in a poem that, paradoxically, helped bring this doomed institution into being. Alfred Tennyson's "Carmen Sæculare. An Ode in Honour of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria," commonly called the Jubilee Ode, also suggests the Imperial Institute's proleptic collapse before the building took actual form. The poem's own form itself became, like the building, an object of amused dismissal. Both the institute and the ode found correlates in a grandiose and short-lived organization that became similarly subject to charges of internal incoherence and irrelevance, the Imperial Federation League, which had disbanded by 1893, less than a decade after its founding in 1884. The organization boasted a prominent membership, including the Poet Laureate, as well as J. R. Seeley, the historian and author of the highly influential 1883 imperialist treatise, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures. This is a crucial affiliation in Tennyson's final decade; as a footnote in Hallam Tennyson's two-volume memoir of his father states, "[o]ne of the deepest desires of his life was to help the realization of the ideal of an Empire by the most intimate union of every part of our British Empire."3 A specific aim of the Imperial Federation League was to promote the permanent union of the British Empire into a single federal entity, with a London-based imperial parliament responsible for common trade and defense policy.4 This desire for the "most intimate" and permanent union of all parts of the empire was expressed by both the organization and the ode. When in 1893 the Imperial Institute formally opened its doors, George Baden-Powell, in an article titled "The Empire and Its Institute," called it not only "a necessity" but also "the consummation of what is meant by the popular phrase 'Imperial Federation.'"5 The first part of this essay addresses some aims and influences of the Imperial Federation League, especially in its multimodal ideological intersections...

In 1930, a trust was formed to provide a home for men of British descent from throughout the Empire who had come as students to London. The Dominion Students Hall Trust (DSHT) and its physical embodiment, London House, thereafter emerged as centres for imperial connectedness. Through the support and finance of elites in business, banking, and government, and partnership with imperial interest groups, London House established itself as a symbol of and locus for the pre-eminent imperial vision of the inter-war. This vision was founded on a belief in the value of cooperation between Great Britain and the self-governing Dominions, constituents of a ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ or ‘British world’. In this article, British world cooperation is shown to have been fundamental to the foundation and success of the DSHT, making London House an instance of what Tamson Pietsch has termed ‘British world sites’. Drawing on this idea, the article demonstrates how preconceptions about imperial unity and British race patriotism affected the DSHT's foundation as well as London House's architecture. It concludes with an appraisal of how the deterioration of the British world's cachet as a source of imperial unity and supranational identity was received by both institutions.

Formed in 1884, the Imperial Federation League sought to promote the idea of imperial unity, based on a vision of Britain and its colonies consolidating as a single polity. Consideration of the place of the British West Indies in a federation scheme served to highlight the divisions within the empire and the differences in understandings of imperial citizenship. Federationists were inconsistent about whether the West Indies should form part of the self-governing empire, based largely on different assumptions about race and the capacity for self-government. This failure to clearly define the nature of imperial community highlighted the tensions and inconsistencies of late-Victorian imperialism.

This article delves upon Zimbabwe’s 2002 suspension from the Commonwealth of Nations and the relentless efforts of South Africa and other peers to get that suspension lifted, in the context of continuous rebuttals from states such as the UK and Australia. The research piece touches primarily upon the underlying motives for the said suspension, as well as the reasoning behind the bandwagoning of nations on the ongoing issues plaguing Zimbabwe in the early 2000s. Furthermore, it tangentially covers themes such as: the balance within the Commonwealth, global North versus South interpretations of democracy – and the realities they produce, and the rationale of two-sided post-colonial narratives. In our endeavour we have used a series of primary and secondary literary sources. Our conclusion is that South Africa gave primacy to its own foreign policy objectives, and thereby, allowed democracy to continue to disintegrate in Zimbabwe. Our research piece purposefully lacks the classical structure one might expect, for we consider that the chosen style of organizing information best befits the general public and specialized reads alike.

This dissertation argues that white Britons imagined the British Empire as a white space in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taking the Imperial federation movement as an example of the phenomenon at the Imperial scale and taking Queensland as an example at the level of an individual colony. It shows that the proponents of Imperial federation-a movement to reform the constitution of the British Empire by such means as creating an Imperial legislature in which colonies would be represented-imagined the Empire as a white space, largely ignoring the existence of the majority of British subjects who were racialized as nonwhite. It similarly shows that white settlers in Queensland imagined it as a white space, both in its early colonial development and after it became a state in the Commonwealth of Australia. There was more than one way in which a state could be imagined as white, however, as illustrated by the tension between imagining Queensland as a plantation colony reliant on indentured laborers of color-a space of white racial domination-and imagining Queensland as a space of white racial exclusion, as it became under the federal White Australia policy after 1901. The dissertation also explores the boundaries of whiteness, highlighting the incoherence of the category and the contingency of who it included and excluded. Sources for the dissertation are both archival and published. The primary archival sources are public records at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Queensland State Archives, and the National Archives of Australia. The main published sources are Australian newspapers (in particular, the National Library of Australia's digitized Trove collection) and the books, pam- phlets, and journal articles published by participants in the debates around Imperial federation.--Author's abstract

Identity and Political Independence

Under terms of the Treaty of 1921 between Great Britain and Ireland, it was agreed that: “Ireland shall have the same constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire as the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa, with a Parliament having powers to make laws for the peace, order and good government of Ireland and an Executive responsible to that Parliament, and shall be styled and known as the Irish Free State.” The status of the Irish Free State was further defined by this language: “Subject to the provisions hereinafter set out, the position of the Irish Free State in relation to the Imperial Parliament and Government and otherwise shall be that of the Dominion of Canada, and the law, practice and constitutional usage governing the relationship of the Crown or the representative of the Crown and of the Imperial Parliament to the Dominion of Canada shall govern their relationship to the Irish Free State.” The Imperial Government gave this treaty the force of law by the Irish Free State (Agreement) Act of March 31, 1922. To implement the treaty, Dáil Eireann, sitting as a constituent assembly, enacted a constitution for the Irish Free State in 1922. This constitution declared: “The Irish Free State (otherwise hereinafter called or sometimes called Saorstát Eireann) is a co-equal member of the Community of Nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations.” It was given the force of law by the Imperial Government in the Irish Free State Constitution Act of December 5, 1922.

This article takes a global historical approach to American protectionism and the British imperial federation movement of the late nineteenth century, showing how US tariff policy was intimately intertwined with the political and economic policies of the British empire of free trade. This article argues that the 1890 McKinley Tariff's policies helped call into question Britain's liberal, free trade, global empire by drumming up support for an imperial, protectionist, preferential Greater Britain. The tariff also speeded up the demand and development of more efficient transportation and communications—technological developments that made imperial federation all the more viable—within the British Empire. This article is thus a global history of the McKinley Tariff's impact upon the British Empire, as well as a study of the tariff's effect upon the history of modern globalisation.

While Federation in 1901 failed to lodge in the popular imagination, Australians widely embraced the idea that their nation was born at Gallipoli during World War I. Despite its subsequent ubiquity, the form of nationalism that spawned the legend of martial birth was not the only kind that had currency during World War I. This article traces the ideal of Australian nationhood held by imperialist liberals, such as Alfred Deakin and members of the Round Table group, through the campaign for imperial federation. It argues that the distance between Australian and British interests that became apparent during the war and the peace process put paid to Australian interest in imperial federation, and to the quasi-mystical ideal of nationalism that went with it. Australians were left with a martial nationalism that was more strident, parochial and anxious than the imperial liberalism that propelled the Federation movement.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.

Challenging earlier scholarship that has suggested that the Commonwealth Games contributed unproblematically to imperial and commonwealth unity, this article explores the multiple, and conflicting, contemporary local meanings of the 1954 British Empire & Commonwealth Games held in Vancouver, Canada. In addition to emphasising the sporting and economic dimensions of the Games, the article introduces the concept of ‘liquid imperialism’ to highlight the complexity of Canada's imperial connection in the post-war era. By examining not only official pronouncements, but also oppositional voices and the manner in which the Games were appropriated by a number of competing interests, the article argues for a more complex understanding of the Games' cultural influence while examining the nature of Canada's imperial connection during the middle of the 20th century.

Members of a company can vote in general meetings to alter the company’s constitution. The courts can also alter the company’s constitution under section 37(1) of the Companies Act 2016. The problem is that of statutory construction. A literal interpretation means altering the contents of the constitution without voting. A purposive construction entails an alteration of the quorum or procedures to facilitate proper voting. The objective of this paper is to ascertain how the Malaysian courts exercise that power. A comparative research methodology involving a legal doctrinal analysis is employed. Primary and secondary sources of law throughout the commonwealth countries are ascertained as to the effect of the law on the research objectives. The findings reveal that alteration by the court entails a direct alteration of the constitution and not the procedures therein to facilitate proper voting. In the absence of oppression, an alteration is possible to satisfy the legitimate business or management expectations of members, according to a shareholders' agreement. This is true in private companies where shares cannot be transferred to outsiders and quasi-partnership companies. Retrospective alteration and alteration that affects third-party rights cannot be made in the event proper voting can be executed under the existing constitution.

2009 release of Star, Jane Campion's film about John Keats's last years and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, engendered a range of reactions. Writing for Guardian, Peter Bradshaw contended, The movie is vulnerable to mockery or irony from pundits who might feel that ... their appreciation of the poet exceeds that of the director. Nonetheless, think it is a deeply felt and intelligent film, one of those that has grown in my mind on a second viewing; it is almost certainly the best of Campion's career. A. O. Scott of New York Times and Frances Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement likewise praised Campion's focus on the end of Keats's life through the lens of his love for Brawne. As Bradshaw anticipated, however, the response from academics was considerably more circumspect. One of the most vocal critics of was Christopher Ricks, who took issue with both the actors' voicing of Keats's poems and with Jane Campion's more general approach to dramatizing Keats's lyricism. In New York Review of Books, Ricks singles out Campion's literal-minded approach of providing concrete visual analogs for the images invoked in Keats's poems; a film should, above all, never offer simple of the very things that a great writer has superbly--by means of the chosen medium of words alone--enabled us to imagine, to picture. A film that proceeds to furnish competing pictures of its own will render pointless the previous acts of imagination that it purports to respect or to honor. For among the accomplishments of the poet is that he or she brings it about that we see with the mind's eye, as against the eye of flesh (46). Ricks is not saying that poetry in general, or Keats's poetry in particular, is hostile to the cinematic imagination; rather, he finds fault with Campion's use of literal visual analogs for Keats's poetic images. For her part, Campion has identified her primary source material as Keats's correspondence, rather than his poetry: I read all the letters. didn't read all the poems. Then worked out a storyline (Sullivan 87). Accordingly, during a voiceover sequence in in which Keats (Ben Whishaw) reads from a letter he wrote to Fanny about a walk on seashore, the audience sees a shot of Whishaw standing on a beach looking at the ocean. Similarly, when Whishaw's Keats recites the sonnet Bright Star to Abbie Cornish's Brawne, he utters the speaker's sensation of being pillowed on my fair love's breast as he is, literally, resting his head on Cornish's bosom. shortcomings Ricks describes are perhaps difficult to avoid in a film with some extremely ambitious aims. In the panel discussion on the film at the New York Public Library in September, 2009, Timothy Corrigan interpreted Campion's focus on Brawne as a feminist intervention even as the director also sought to introduce Keats's achievement to a mainstream, contemporary audience. Campion's dual goal of entertaining and educating reflects the ideological legacy of its producers, which were public service broadcasters from Australia (Screen Australia) and the UK (BBC films). goal of education and entertainment has been an established part of public service broadcasting, particularly in the British commonwealth, since the earliest days (the 1920s) of the BBC under its first general director, Lord John Reith; a film about Keats would certainly seem to fall within the remit of organizations like the BBC, charged with cultivating a collective appreciation of British cultural traditions. Part of making Keats's life story and work accessible to a wide public means, for Campion, situating that work within a visual formula that straightforwardly translates imaginative transformation into concrete images. Rather than attempting to defamiliarize our experience, Campion aims to make Keats's language familiar by presenting tactile and visually knowable origins for his linguistic processing of reality. …

The article describes the priorities of Russian Federation’s chairmanship of the Commonwealth of Independent States in 2024. The relevance of the chosen topic is determined by Russia's clear intention over the past few years to intensify its policy in the Commonwealth, among other things, in order to stop «unfriendly actions of foreign states» provoking «disintegration processes in neighboring countries». The main substantive aspect of the article was the analysis of primary source documentation related to the activities of the CIS as an international organization. Special attention is paid to the study of planned activities aimed at implementing the operational concept of Russia's chairmanship of the CIS, the Greater European Partnership Initiative realization and expected progress in various fi elds (in terms of how Russia contextualize it). It is noted that Russia's chairmanship of the CIS will be used by the country, fi rst of all, to deepen the integration in the economic sphere, and also for the development of humanitarian contacts with the Commonwealth countries. The author highlighted the main areas («politics», «economics and fi nance», «energy and transport», «environmental issues», «IT sector», «law enforcement, security, and defense», «science, education, and culture»), in which Russia intends to act as a leader of the Commonwealth, offering its own agenda for multilateral negotiations and the ways of further integration. This article, in addition to the achievements, plans and prospects of the Commonwealth development, addresses some problems that the organization faces nowadays. Given the results of the study, the author makes reasonable forecasts for achieving tangible results of Russia’s chairmanship of the CIS in 2024.