Julia Margaret Cameron and the Legacy of the British Empire

This article focuses on the life of medical doctor Kōzō Andō (安藤公三) and his family as Japanese citizens in the British Empire, medical practitioners within inter-imperial biomedical frameworks and as intermediaries of Japanese imperialism during the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II. The Andō family came to settle on the Malay peninsula in the late nineteenth century which was under the control of the British but still part of Japan’s nan’yō imaginary. Both Kōzō Andō and his younger brother Jun’ichiro (安藤純一郎) were trained as medical doctors at the King Edward VII Medical College in Singapore, one of the well-regarded training institutions for medicine in the British Empire and Southeast Asia at the time. When Japan invaded Malaya, Kōzō Andō was made Chief Medical Officer of Syonan (Singapore), a position which he held until his retirement and return to Japan in 1943. The life of Kōzō Andō points to his ambiguous situation in Malaya under British and Japanese empires due to his positionality as Japanese, as part of a larger Asian racial category in Malaya, and as a medical doctor in an inter-imperial setting.

In this forcefully argued comparative history, Julian Go refutes exceptionalist interpretations of American imperialism. In the crosshairs are scholars who deny the existence of empire in American history, as well as those who contend that the American Empire has been more progressive and liberal than the empires of Old World powers due to the anticolonial political traditions of the United States. Rather than viewing the American Empire as something unique, Go demonstrates that it shares fundamental traits with the British Empire. Go advances this argument through a comparative analysis of the American and British Empires at comparable stages of their development. Chapters compare the two empires in their phases of ascent (1730–1815 in the case of Britain; 1803–1945 for the United States), hegemonic maturity (1816–1873 for Britain; 1945–1973 for the United States), and decline (1874–1939 for Britain and since 1973 for the United States). If some might question these periodizations, particularly that the British Empire was in decline in the late nineteenth century, the chronological groupings give Go's comparisons freshness and utility by enabling him to find recurring patterns in different empires at different times.

Reviewed by: Canada and the British Empire Ryan M. Touhey Canada and the British Empire. Edited by Phillip Buckner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 320 pp. $70.00 (cloth). Media coverage of the royal visit to Canada of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall in November 2009 illustrates that the British monarchy still has a core of dedicated supporters across the country. However, the dwindling crowds, in contrast to years past, who gathered to catch a glimpse of the royals also underscores the fact that an increasing segment of Canadian society looks upon the royal connection with apathy. There was, of course, an era when the imperial connection mattered to a majority of Canadians and was vital to the formation of the Canadian state. A recent flurry of scholarship has begun not only to reassess the meaning of Canada's historic ties with the British Empire and Great Britain but also to emphasize the significance of this connection. And Phillip Buckner has been involved with many of these works having edited or coedited works such as Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity (2006), Canada and the End of Empire (2005), and Rediscovering the British World (2006). Buckner notes that the magisterial Oxford History of the British Empire series published in 1998-1999 paid little heed to the dominions. To correct this oversight, he produced the companion volume Canada and the British Empire to offer "a Canadian perspective on the history of Canada's long participation in the British Empire" (p. vi). The central thrust of the collection is that Canadian history cannot be understood without placing its development within the imperial context. In large part, the book achieves those goals. Canada and the British Empire is composed of fourteen chapters, three of which Buckner wrote. The chapters explore the topic chronologically and thematically. Buckner's introductory chapter examines why Canadian and imperial history, "once . . . intertwined and interconnected," became increasingly seen "as two entirely different fields of study" (p. 14). He argues that most Canadian historians continue to believe that Canadian participation in the empire was "an [End Page 171] elite preoccupation" with little support among the general populace (p. 14). Buckner argues this is not only false, but faulty history ignoring that English Canadians were often active imperialists on the world stage, and also at home in their relationships with aboriginal peoples. Buckner's critique has some merit. Scholars of imperial history became increasingly critical in their assessments of the empire in the 1960s, and this coincided with a new generation of Canadian historians who rejected the primacy of the British Empire as the primary driver of national development. In many respects the writing of Canadian history became inward, and even parochial, when most scholars neglected the extent to which international currents, ideas, and ideologies influenced Canada's development. Chapters 2 to 6 examine Canada's relationship with the British Empire from the seventeenth century to 1982. John Reid and Elizabeth Mancke explore "the global processes" that influenced the emergence of British North America to 1783. J. M. Bumsted picks up the baton in his masterful sweep of BNA's political development to 1860. In chapter 4, Buckner explores the period from 1860 to 1901 and challenges the assertion that "Imperial enthusiasm waned" following Confederation. On the contrary, he highlights the linkages between imperialism and English-Canadian nationalism during the period, an argument earlier advanced by Carl Berger. A significant omission in Buckner's work, however, is the irony that while English Canadians may have felt more integrated into the British Empire and self-confident as the twentieth century dawned (p. 85), such sentiments came at the price of national unity. Enthusiasm for Canada's participation in the Boer War was not reciprocated by the overwhelming majority of French Canadians and added to the religious and linguistic tensions stirred by disputes over minority rights in the 1880s and 1890s. John Herd Thompson's essay addresses Canada's languid transition from the British to the American sphere of influence from 1901 to 1939. He persuasively argues that the First World War did not mark, as Canadian historians frequently assume, the death knell of Canadian imperialism (p...

This afterword compares and contrasts both the positions of missionaries within the French and British empires, as well as the way historians have conceptualized the relationships between Catholic and Protestant missions and the two imperial states. With reference to a number of the chapters in this collection, the article reflects on the mutual suspicion and anxiety felt by missionaries and colonial officials that permeated both French and British empires.

: Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States has been the sole remaining superpower. It is not a stretch of the imagination to consider it an empire. America dominates the world culturally, politically, economically, and militarily, in much the same way as a traditional empire, although without the direct possession of territory. The last global power was Great Britain during the reigns of Victoria and Edward. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Empire was the envy of the other great powers; the greatest empire the world had ever seen to that time; the time of the Pax Britannica. Since the end of World War II, America and the West generally have enjoyed peace and prosperity. Despite the Cold War, occasional regional wars, and a variety of local conflicts and revolutions, this era is often referred to as the Pax Americana in view of the protection and stability provided by American military and economic power. This paper will examine four factors that influenced the strategic environment and the development of the British and American empires.

This chapter begins from the proposition that there was neither peace settlement, nor order, nor peace in the British and French empires after 1919. It focuses on those regions where British and French imperial territories and new imperial claims rubbed against one another with greatest friction. With typical acuity, historian John Mackenzie has warned against what he terms ‘the space station approach’ to the analysis of interwar imperialism. Viewed from a great distance, the First World War ‘becomes a sort of hinge or lever that articulates the events of the decades that went before and also those that came afterwards’. Mackenzie’s insight offers a starting point for this chapter’s analysis, which warns against regarding decolonisation deterministically, written as much in the failure of peacemaking as in the intensification of international rivalries in the 1930s. It thus draws the British and French empires back from their historical precipice, restoring a sense of contingency and according due importance to the short-term imperial expansions of the 1920s and the persistence of everyday violence and colonial rights abuses despite the new architecture of supranational oversight emerging from the peace settlement.

ON occasion—fortunately for reviewers, rare ones—books come along to which it is impossible to do justice in a journal review. Because this is such a book, it must be made clear at the outset that it is a superb work of scholarship, elegant in conception, vast in scope and erudition, and of great significance to eighteenth-century British, Indian, American, and imperial history. Every serious student of those subjects needs to come to terms with it; anyone who has even a passing interest in the period can profit from reading it. Professor Marshall encompasses within a single narrative ‘what it is conventional to keep apart, … the loss of a British territorial empire in much of North America and the creation of a new territorial empire in eastern India’ (p. 1). He dismisses the distinction between a ‘first’ and a ‘second’ British empire as illusory. From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth, English commercial, cultural, and territorial dominion had grown simultaneously in North America and India as aspects of a haphazard worldwide expansionism. Parliament and the Crown began trying to rationalise relations between the metropolis and its dependencies in the late 1740s, largely in response to the perceived threats posed by France. The Seven Years’ War interrupted these attempts to make sovereign power the basis of an effective empire; the decisive, expensive victories of 1758–62 radically intensified both British patriotism and pressures for imperial reform.

The government of the Dominion of Canada hoped their western territory would be filled with immigrants eager to work the land and further strengthen the British Empire in the early 20th century. British stock were viewed as ideal settlers as they would be able to represent and maintain the customs and behavior of the British Empire. Many brought with them to the Canadian frontier a variety of traditions - one of which was the habit of drinking tea. How did tea reinforce British identity and Empire in the Canadian West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? This paper contends that tea was a powerful tool for nation builders because it reinforced British identity and empire.

<i>Søren Frank</i>, Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad<i>Migration and Literature: Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, and Jan Kjærstad</i>. Søren Frank. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. ix+235.

Laughing at the Mahdi:The British Comic Press and Empire, 1882–85 Michael de Nie (bio) This essay will explore comic commentary on events in Egypt and the Sudan between 1882 and 1885 in the leading London and Birmingham comic weeklies. In this period Northeast Africa experienced nearly simultaneous outbreaks of political and religious radicalism with far-reaching consequences for both the region and the British Empire. The Arabi Rebellion, which began in Egypt in 1881, was the West's first encounter with what would later be termed Arab nationalism as Arabi Pasha and his followers demanded "Egypt for the Egyptians" and an end to European oversight of the country's finances.1 The British invasion of 1882 and the ensuing occupation placed the Suez Canal firmly under British control, helping spark the scramble for Africa and the New Imperialism. Soon after they established a de facto protectorate in Egypt, the British faced a religious revolt in the Sudan, which had come under Egyptian rule in the early nineteenth century. Led by Muhammad Ahmad, who had declared himself the Mahdi (Guided One), the prophesied redeemer of Islam, the revolt was arguably the first occurrence of militarized Islamic fundamentalism in the modern era.2 Historians tend to study these two events separately, usually in the interest of making the research topic more manageable rather than from a failure to see the connections between them. But in the minds of most contemporaries in Britain and Ireland, these events were regarded as two chapters of a single story: the Egyptian Wars. Debate in the press and Parliament over Egyptian policy and the British interest in Northeast Africa certainly did not dissipate after the victory at Tel-el-Kebir in September 1882. Most viewed the Mahdist rising as a new and increasingly vexing wrinkle in the already difficult question of what to do with Egypt and how best to protect Britain's imperial interests against European competitors and internal turbulence. The Egyptian Wars were also, of course, interpreted [End Page 437] in the context of other contemporary imperial and domestic concerns, such as the Irish Question, franchise reform, and the state of India. Comic commentary on these and similar subjects shared the pages with discussion of Egypt and the Sudan, sometimes in the same cartoon or joke and especially when remarking on the government's difficulties.3 Among scholars, British intervention in Northeast Africa is commonly regarded as one of the key events of the New Imperialism, and some have detected an important change in British imperial ideology in this period.4 Scholars such as Jonathan Parry and Karuna Mantena argue that whereas Britons in the early nineteenth century often portrayed imperial expansion in moral terms as a duty undertaken to spread civilization and the gospel, by the closing decades of the century many or most Britons retreated from this ethical approach. Due to hardening racial attitudes and growing concerns over the balance of power in Europe, Britons increasingly referred to British prestige, security, and economic interests as justification for expanding the empire. But in my research on both the comic and mainstream press's reporting on British intervention in Egypt and the Sudan, I have found that while both prestige and British interests were commonly cited throughout this period, moral language had not entirely disappeared. Indeed, wide sections of the daily and comic press commonly debated the ethics of British intervention in Northeast Africa while also asserting the need for some form of British control or supervision over a region they deemed incapable of self-rule. Scholars of the British and other empires have of course examined the comic press, but their attention has been almost exclusively limited to how the weekly cuts, the full-page cartoons typically placed in the center of each issue, demonstrate European racism, sexism, and other prejudices. This essay explores press opinion on empire and imperial policy through a more thorough examination of the late-Victorian comic weeklies, making full use of the rich collection of jokes, puns, poems, songs, and smaller illustrations found in the pages of Punch, Funny Folks, the Owl, and others during the Egyptian Wars of 1882–85. A study of the comic press...

Until recently, the role of European women in the expansion and consolidation of the British colonial empire has been largely ignored by both historians and women's studies scholars. This is an analysis of one such woman who played a leading role in the development of the British Empire in south‐central Africa, Ethel Tawse Jollie (1875–1950), formerly Ethel Colquhoun. In partnership with her first husband, Archibald Ross Colquhoun, explorer, writer and Cecil Rhodes's first Administrator of Mashonaland, she became steeped in the philosophy of the Edwardian ‘Radical Right’, the post Anglo‐Boer War reaction to imperial decline, and she played a prominent role in the opposition to the women's suffrage campaign before the Great War. As a member of the Legislative Council of Southern Rhodesia, she became the first woman parliamentarian in the British overseas empire. She was a prolific writer on imperial affairs and a leading intellectual of her political generation and, as the founder and principal organiser of the Rhodesian Responsible Government Association (RGA) (1917–1922), she imported from Britain a singular political philosophy shaped by the Edwardian ideology of ‘National Efficiency’. She played a central role in the achievement of responsible government in Southern Rhodesia in 1923, which set the territory's separate course outside the Union of South Africa. No other Rhodesian politician had achieved such prominence in the metropolis, or possessed such a thoroughly formed and comprehensive ideology, or the propaganda skills necessary for a simultaneous confrontation with the imperial and South African governments, local capitalists and the ruling British South Africa Company. During her parliamentary career she sought to promote European settlement and improve the educational, health and communications infrastructure of Southern Rhodesia. She paid particular attention to the development of a strong local identity which would attach the settlers more closely to their community and to the British Empire at large.

The colonial history of India is frequently associated with the British Empire, yet the French Empire also had a long-lasting and significant presence in India. Jessica Namakkal illuminates this important aspect of India’s colonial history and its legacy in her engaging book, which offers original insights and contributions to various disciplines, including French studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, political science, and memory studies. Namakkal draws on a wide range of sources, perspectives, and original methodologies, including the study of archival material, the press of various nations, memoirs, interviews, visual media, and observations of the landscape and events taking place in contemporary Pondicherry, the former capital of the French Empire in India. The work highlights the complex entanglements, tensions, and rivalries between the British and French Empires that shaped India’s colonial history. The author offers detailed portraits of key figures who played important roles in defining the colonial history and the future of French India, such as Sri Aurobindo, Mira Alfassa, Édouard Goubert, and Raphael Ramanyya Dadala, tracing their actions and examining their thought. The volume also explores the complex interrelations between identity, nationality, ethnicity, and caste of residents of French India, and highlights the ways in which attitudes towards nationality shifted in tandem with the evolving policies and politics of the Empire. Namakkal casts light on the various migrant trajectories which arose as a consequence of the French Empire in India, including the experiences of those who migrated from Europe to French India, those who sought refuge from the British Empire in French Indian territories, and those who migrated from India to France after independence. Through an analysis of various case studies, Namakkal explores the plight of French nationals of Indian origin after independence, who were frequently alienated from both nations. She also provides fresh insight into the experiences and political significance of mixed-race residents of French India, offering a new perspective on the concept of ‘creolization’ in the context of Pondicherry. A particular strength of the work lies in its novel approach to the concept of decolonization. The author argues that decolonization in the context of French India is not merely to be equated with liberation and peace, but suggests that it engendered violence, and remains incomplete in various senses. Namakkal casts light on the ways in which various aspects of the colonial regime, including divisions and inequalities between local and foreign populations, and the oppression of indigenous populations, continue today in the form of the settlement of Auroville near Pondicherry, which, despite the utopian vision of its founder, Alfassa, ‘exemplifies the phenomenon of anticolonial colonialism, a key concept in understanding neocolonialism in a postcolonial world’ (p. 183). This thoroughly researched and thought-provoking book, which offers insights into a frequently neglected aspect of India’s colonial history, is ­especially valuable to scholars working in postcolonial, French, and South Asian studies.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the process of formation of the image of Palestine and the British Empire at the end of the First World War. On the basis of the materials of American cartoons and periodicals, the main points in the evolution of the attitude of American society to Palestine are considered, the complexities and contradictions in understanding the features of the British Empire are shown. The study of cartoons will help determine the nature of the interaction of textual and visual images in the US media during the discussion of the results of the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations and the mandate system. Based on the study of cartoons, two stages in the perception of Palestine in the United States are distinguished: 1) “romantic” and 2) “critical”. New images of Palestine, the British colonial empire, and the Middle East first appeared in newspaper articles, and only later in cartoons. The debate between apologetic and critical strands of US public opinion regarding Palestine and the British model of internal security in the colonies became in 1919 one element of a more global debate between Democrats and Republicans about the role of the US in the League of Nations.

This article examines the relationship between the extreme right and the British Empire during the postwar era. It will first provide a brief review of existing scholarship on the postwar extreme right. It will then go on to argue that scholars have neglected a crucial aspect of the extreme right in postwar Britain – its relationship with imperialism and more specifically, decolonisation – before offering a short overview of extreme right attitudes to Empire during the period in question. The two organisations which will be analysed are Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement and the League of Empire Loyalists, led by A.K. Chesterton. The Union Movement sought to break with Britain's imperial past whilst simultaneously promoting a new imperial vision which wanted to see European colonial powers pool their imperial resources in order to match Soviet and US power. The League of Empire Loyalists however sought to promote the conservative tradition of revering the British Empire during its final days and wanted Britain to re‐assert control over their imperial possessions. Crucial to both organisations' imperial visions was conspiracy theory, namely, the idea of a global Jewish conspiracy which was seeking to undermine the British Empire. The article will conclude by demonstrating that there is ample opportunity for future study into the relationship between the postwar extreme right and Empire.

This chapter re-examines the British Empire’s World War I alliance with Zionism as an exercise in legitimation. Unlike traditional Zionist historiography, Renton argues that the Balfour Declaration has to be understood in the context of the global imperial politics of race. From this perspective, he shows that the British Empire enlisted Zionism as a means of solving a new perceived Jewish Question: the specter of a supposed global Jewish power, opposed to the Allied cause. This policy led to the British and French empires including Zionism in the political cartography for a post-Ottoman Western Asia. The misconceived racial thought behind this re-mapping resulted in the sponsorship of Jewish and Arab nationalisms in the Holy Land, which led, he argues, to the beginnings of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.