Representations within Irish national school readers in the 19th century: Ireland, British Empire and the wider world

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late‐Eighteenth‐Century Britain

Ellen Montgomery overlooks Edinburgh from the window of her uncle's mansion. Illustration by Frederick Dielman, from Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892), 528. Religious Transnationalism in the American Renaissance : Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World JOHN CARLOS ROWE In the middle of Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World (1850), Kitty Dolan appears at Rev. Humphreys's house to beg him to visit her dying son, John Dolan. Kitty is a poor Irish American Catholic living in the neighborhood of the Humphreys's comfortable home in rural New York, and her appeal to Humphreys , a Presbyterian minister, signals to the reader one of many moments of religious didacticism in Warner's romance. Although raised a Catholic, John Dolan has regularly attended Rev. Humphreys's church '"to hear,'" he says, '"yer honor spake the good words.'"1 John's deathbed conversion occurs at the same time that Alice Humphreys introduces her brother John Humphreys to the novel's heroine, "their little sister" Ellen Montgomery, initiating the spiritual romance that will culminate in Ellen and John becoming engaged in the ancestral home of her mother's relatives in Edinburgh, the original source of the Presbyterianism Warner advocates so vigorously in The Wide, Wide World. John Dolan's conversion focuses our attention on nineteenth -century religion's powerful transnational reach and the forces it employed in a global effort to rebuild a Christian commonwealth . Christianity's transnational and transcultural ambitions were profoundly involved in nationalism, even if the ultimate goal was the transcendence of anything as secular as fSQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2003 45 JOHW CARLOS ROWE the nation-state. Today we often condemn the collapse of the constitutional separation of church and state, especially in the face of new enthusiasms for Christian fundamentalism and evangelicism, but this contemporary problem has its roots in nineteenth-century Christian Protestantism, its vigorous advocacy of U.S. nationalism, an expansionist zeal uniting spiritual conversion with political imperialism, and an apparently contradictory anti-colonialism. Benedict Anderson argues that nation-states superseded the medieval religious empires of Islam and Catholicism only by virtue of legitimating themselves through strong appeals to religion.2Although the central roles played by religion in Spanish, Portuguese, British, and other European imperialisms are well known, Protestantism's part in U.S. expansion is still eccentric to most scholarly discussions . In "Manifest Domesticity," Amy Kaplan argues that nineteenth -century U.S. expansion relied on an ideology of domestic stability imbued with Christian evangelical ardor. Kaplan links the "empire of the mother" with "the American empire" by showing how both aimed "to encompass the world outside their borders" and contradictorily "to exclude persons conceived of as racially foreign within those expanding national boundaries." Kaplan's approach links the domestic sphere's regulation of women with the imperial mission to "civilize" foreigners, especially "pagans" and "heathens," and it does so in more than merely rhetorical terms. In her discussion of Sarah Josepha Hale's advocacy of Thanksgiving as a national holiday and of women's potential roles in African colonization , Kaplan shows how imperial and domestic ideologies worked together to practical effect. Kaplan concludes that " [understanding the imperial reach of domesticity and its relation to the foreign should help remap . . . the broader international and national contexts in which unfold narratives of female development. " 3 Warner's Wide, Wide Worldis one of Kaplan's examples of sentimental romances whose conventional focus on "the interiority of the female subject" is transformed when viewed from the perspective of nineteenth-century imperialist nationalism: 46 WARNER AND REUGIOUS TRANSNATIONALE Even at the heart of The Wide, Wide World, a novel usually understood as thoroughly closeted in interior space, where the heroine disciplines herself through reading and prayer, her favorite book is the popular biography of George Washington, the father of the nation. Her own journey to live with her Scottish relatives can be seen as a feminized re-enactment of the American revolution against the British empire.4 For Kaplan, the religious discipline in Warner's romance is indistinguishable from the vaguely defined Protestant ethos of nineteenth-century northeastern culture. We certainly need what Kaplan terms a "remapping" of how national and imperial interests complemented...

Lord Derby was the first British statesman to become prime minister three times. He remains the longest serving party leader in modern British politics, heading the Conservative party for twenty-two years from 1846 to 1868. He abolished slavery in the British Empire, established a national system of education in Ireland, was a prominent advocate for the 1832 Reform Act and, as prime minister, oversaw the introduction of the Second Reform Act (1867). Yet no biography of Derby, based upon his papers and correspondence, has previously been published. This book revises the conventional portrait of Derby as a dull and apathetic politician, revealing him as a complex, astute, influential, and significant figure, who had a profound effect on the politics and society of his time. As the author shows, far from being an uninterested dilettante, Derby played an instrumental role in directing Britain's path through the historic opportunities and challenges confronting the nation at a time of increasing political participation, industrial pre-eminence, urban growth, colonial expansion, religious controversy, and Irish tragedy.

In examining how children engaged with the British Empire, broadly defined, during the long eighteenth century, this article considers a range of materials, including museums, printed juvenile literature, and board games, that specifically attempted to attract children and their parents. Subjects that engaged with the wider world, and with it the British Empire, were typically not a significant part of formal education curricula, and so an informal marketplace of materials and experiences emerged both to satisfy and drive parental demand for supplementary education at home. Such engagements were no accident. Rather, they were a conscious effort to provide middling and elite children with what was considered useful information about the wider world and empire they would inherit, as well as opportunities to consider the moral implications and obligations of imperial rule, particularly with regard to African slavery.

Reviewed by: 'The Better Class' of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858–1914 Shompa Lahiri (bio) 'The Better Class' of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858–1914, by A. Martin Wainwright; pp. xiii + 273. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2008, £60.00, $84.95. 'The Better Class' of Indians draws upon two streams of scholarship: David Cannadine's emphasis on the importance of class over "race" as a prism through which British officials interpreted colonial subjects, and the small but growing collection of histories of Indo-British encounters in imperial Britain, developed by, among others, Antoinette Burton, Michael H. Fisher, Satadru Sen, and myself. A. Martin Wainwright's study focuses on how British civil servants, charities, educators, and missionaries sought to translate Indian social hierarchies into the British lexicon of class. Furthermore, according to Wainwright, elite Indian sojourners in Britain also exploited the language of class to claim high social rank in Victorian and Edwardian society. This book is thus concerned with official attitudes and policy towards loyal Indians, rather than the influential but disloyal Indian nationalists, who visited and studied in imperial Britain and went on to govern independent India and Pakistan. 'The Better Class' of Indians is split into two parts. Part 1 examines the background of British administrators and the government and government-sponsored institutions that dealt with the colonial Indian population in Britain. The first three chapters [End Page 751] are devoted to the India Office, the National Indian Association, and the London City Mission. Part 2 explores the "interactions" between a variety of British officials and Indians including Indian oculists, litigants, entertainers, and, most significantly, students. Each chapter treats a different aspect of the relation between social hierarchy and the treatment of Indians. Indians were accepted by British officials and "polite society" when they successfully adhered to a variety of criteria that could be translated into social rank or elite class status, including "wealth and what it could buy," education, professional status, property, and other gentlemanly traits, including suitable dress, prowess on the sports field, demeanour, lifestyle, and charitable giving (234). Above all, according to Wainwright, British officials were keen to attract loyal Indians to Britain. The subject of chapter 1, K. S. Ranjitsinjhi, "the cricketer prince," matched more of these criteria than most of his Indian compatriots in Britain, leading Wainwright to argue that Ranjitsinjhi's class status overcame barriers of "race." While most of the chapters show how Indian social rankings (including caste) translated into British equivalents, there is the occasional mismatch. For example, Indian oculists did not command the professional status and respect in Britain that they had in India. Instead, they were viewed as quacks by the medical profession and taken to court. The book is not just a study of comparable social hierarchies; it also considers the risks and possibilities of "translation," a highly productive concept that could have been fruitfully explored in greater depth and one instance in which the study could have benefited from a more interdisciplinary approach. Instead Wainwright provides a close and very detailed reading of archival sources that will appeal to some historians but shows limited engagement with wider related secondary literature. Wainwright's keen attempt to distinguish himself from previous scholarship is overstated at times. Nevertheless his focus on elite institutional responses, the uniqueness of Indo-British relations in the imperial metropolis in contrast to India, and the importance of the civilising mission in British official attitudes towards Indians in Britain do make departures from existing research. It would be very difficult to argue that class prejudice did not inform official British attitudes to Indians in Britain, as well as popular responses, given the class-conscious nature of Victorian and Edwardian society. However, this emphasis on class works best within the study when it intersects with other variables, in particular gender and "race." As Anne McClintock argues in Imperial Leather (1995), the "articulated categories" of race, class, and gender should be approached not in splendid isolation, but cross-referentially. Wainwright is on shakier ground when class alone is privileged, such as when he discusses how British officials' own class positions were enhanced...

The character of religious education (RE) in Ireland is intimately linked to the religious patronage (ownership) of most publicly funded schools by religious institutions. Approximately 90 % of schools are run by the Catholic Church. This tradition of religious patronage is increasingly at odds with Ireland’s contemporary multicultural and multireligious society and raises pan-European questions of human rights, especially children’s rights, in the sphere of taxpayer-funded education. The chapter outlines the education system in Ireland (little known outside the republic) and discusses primary and secondary RE as well as current RE teacher education programmes including the innovative “Religions and Global Diversity” undergraduate programme at University College Cork. Progress towards the kind of multireligious RE recommended by the European Council of Ministers has recently slowed. The Irish Government exercises only limited control over what is taught in schools’ RE, and there are still very few teachers properly qualified to deliver education about religions (plural).

Two Scottish architects, John Begg and George Wittet, created some of the most famous of Mumbai’s landmarks and notable buildings elsewhere in India in the early twentieth century. They were also instrumental in the development of architectural education in India through their involvement with the Sir Jamshetji Jeejeebhoy School of Art. Both men made major contributions to the colonial built environment as well as to the future of the architectural profession in India. In this regard, they are highly significant but under-studied Scottish participants in the history of the British Empire. Scottish architects and their role in the shaping of imperial cities around the world have remained largely absent from much of the rich history of Scotland and empire. This article uses the examples of Begg and Wittet to analyse the career trajectories of these two Scottish architects. Through close analysis of Begg’s numerous writings, it becomes clear that in the professional sphere, Begg sought to champion the notable minority of trained British architects serving in India, and to bring their work to the attention of the metropole. In this regard, their professional identity was that of the British imperial architect, while they simultaneously maintained Scottish social and religious connections. Like many Scots before them, they forged fluid Scottish, British, and imperial identities while serving in India.

1. Empire and Society 2. Participation 3. The Prefects 4. The Middle Classes at School 5. Trade, Liberty, and Empire: the Middle Classes to 1880 6. Not in Front of the Servants 7. Culture and Empire 8. Peril and Propaganda c.1900 9. What About the Workers? 10. Imperialists, Other Imperialists, and Others 11. Empire on Condition 1914-40 12. Repercussions 13. Recapitulation and Conclusion Bibliography Index 1. Empire and Society 2. Participation 3. The Prefects 4. The Middle Classes at School 5. Trade, Liberty, and Empire: the Middle Classes to 1880 6. Not in Front of the Servants 7. Culture and Empire 8. Peril and Propaganda c.1900 9. What About the Workers? 10. Imperialists, Other Imperialists, and Others 11. Empire on Condition 1914-40 12. Repercussions 13. Recapitulation and Conclusion Bibliography Index

ABSTRACTThis article explores the three themes of civic nationalism, imperial identities and Punjabi migration by focusing on the life of Sundar Singh, a migrant to Canada who came to prominence in the early 1900s, through his speeches. Sundar Singh employed the idea of equal status of all British subjects in the British Empire to argue for the migration of Sikhs to Canada and other British settler societies and their being treated with respect and fairness on their arrival in their new homes. Although Singh's claim to Britishness was rejected in many sections of Canadian society, it was supported by some white Canadians. The article suggests that British identity of the Empire's Dominions could, in some circumstances, be a force for the inclusion of South Asians. The article also illustrates the way in which developments in India impacted upon those of the diaspora across the British Empire. This idea is developed by demonstrating the importance of the triangular relationship between India, the United Kingdom and Canada as highlighted by the issue of Punjabi migration within the British Empire.

Dept. of History New York University 53 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012 USA jane.burbank@nyu.edu

본고는 판소리에서 엇중모리 대목이 확립되는 시기와 그 이후의 전승과정에 대해 사설 및 배치되는 위치, 그리고 음악적 특징과 관련해 살펴보았다. 엇중모리장단 대목이 포함된 판소리 관련 문헌자료와 음원자료를 대상으로, 문헌자료의 경우 장단이 병기된 판소리 창본들을, 음원자료의 경우 엇중모리장단 대목이 녹음된 음반자료들을 중심으로 다루었다. 그 결과 20세기 전반에 걸쳐 시기에 따라 엇중모리 대목의 전승 양상에 변화가 있음을 알 수 있었다. 20세기 초중반의 엇중모리 대목은 심정순과 김여란의 창본에서 살펴볼 수 있었으며 판소리 한바탕에서 특정 사설과 결합하지 않고 여러 대목에 산재하는 형태로 등장한다. 이후 20세기 중반을 지나면서 엇중모리 대목은 창자별, 바탕별 차이는 있으나 대개 한 바탕에서의 엇중모리 대목이 한 두 대목으로 축소된다. 이 시기는 대개 엇중모리 대목이 축소되는 방향성을 보여주지만 김연수의 경우만 예외적으로 엇중모리 대목의 수가 다른 유파나 창자들에 비해 추가된다. 김연수의 제자인 오정숙에게도 공통적으로 나타나는 엇중모리 대목 수의 추가는 김연수가 작창한 대목이다. 엇중모리 대목이 축소되는 방향성은 20세기 중후반을 거치면서 특정 사설과의 결합으로 모아지는데, 대표적인 사설이 판소리 한바탕의 끝을 맺는 후일담이다. 그밖에 춘향가 중 월매 과거 내력, 수궁가 상좌다툼 중 까마귀 내력과 같은 사설과도 결합하여 ‘○○내력 사설’형태로 나타난다. 그러나 이 시기의 후일담은 종종 다른 장단으로 불리기도 했는데 정응민, 박봉술의 창본이나 임방울의 적벽가 음반을 보면 후일담이 중모리로 부르고 있어 좋은 예라 하겠다. 엇중모리 대목이 축소되는 과정 이후인 20세기 말이 되면 특정 사설과의 결합으로 모아졌던 엇중모리 대목이 완전히 고착화되어 변함없이 전승양상을 보여준다. 20세기 말은 20세기 중·후반에서 후일담이 엇중모리를 포함하여 중중모리, 중모리, 엇모리 등의 장단으로 불렸던 것이 모두 엇중모리로 고착화되는 시기로 이로써 후일담이 엇중모리 대목으로 정착하게 된다. 한편 엇중모리 대목의 음악적 특징은 유파나 창자에 관계없이 전반적인 공통점을 보여주었다. 출현음 중에서 일회적 출현을 하는 음을 제외하면 ‘솔’, ‘도 ’, ‘레 ’, ‘미 ’, ‘파 ’, ‘솔 ’, ‘라 ’의 출현음을 보여주고 모두 ‘도’로 종지한다. 시김새나 요성이 다른 대목들에 비해 전반적으로 적은 편이나 솔 - 도 의 진행에서 추성이 일부 나타나고, ‘미 ’-‘레 ’-‘도 ’ 또는 ‘솔 ’-‘레 ’-‘도 ’ 로 순차하행시 ‘레 ’에 굵은 요성이 특징적이다. 선율적 특징은 도약 진행과 순차적 하강진행을 꼽을 수 있는데 도약진행은 방향에 관계없이 주로 4도, 5도 도약이 많고 순차적 하강진행은 시김새나 동음반복을 만들어낸다. 이러한 음악적 특징은 우조의 특징과 같으며 오늘날 확인되는 판소리 엇중모리의 보편적인 특성이다. 이를 통해 엇중모리 대목의 사설이 고착되는 과정과 달리 음악적 특징은 큰 변화 없이 전승된 것을 알 수 있었다. 즉, 판소리에서 엇중모리 장단 대목이 각 바탕의 가장 마지막에 사용되고, 해당 사설로 주로 후일담을 부르게 된 것은 20세기 중반이고 이러한 형태가 완전히 고착화 된 것은 20세기 후반이라 할 수 있겠지만, 그 음악적 특징은 엇중모리 장단 대목의 생성 이후 변화 없이 전승된 것으로 보인다. 즉, 판소리 엇중모리장단 대목의 전승에 있어서는 그 음악적 특징은 별다른 변화가 없었으며, 사설 내용과 그 대목이 불리는 위치가 20세기 중반 이후 오늘날과 같이 확립되고 그 이후 고착화되는 과정을 거쳤다고 할 수 있겠다.This paper examines the lyrics, the positioning, and the musical features of eotjungmori passage in pansori starting from the period that it was established through its hand-down process afterwards. In this study, we analyzed pansori related literature, mainly the change in rhythmic structure evinced in musical transcriptions of pansori, and audio materials that included recordings of passages with eotjungmori rhythm. As a result, it was found that there was a change in the hand-down pattern of eotjungmori passage through the first half of the 20th century. In the early and mid 20th century, eotjungmori passages can be found in the musical transcriptions of Shim Chong-sun and Kim Yeo-ran. In pansori batang (story), it appears not in conjunction with particular lyrics but is scattered in various passages. After the mid 20th century, while there are differences depending on the singer or batang, the number of eotjungmori passages has generally been reduced to one or two per batang. Although this period usually shows a trend toward reduction in the number of eotjungmori passages, Kim Yeon-soo’s works illustrate an increase, differing from other schools and singers at the time. Likewise, the addition of eotjungmori passages in the performances of Oh Jung-suk can be attributed to those composed by her mentor Kim Yeon-soo. The tendency of reduction in the number of eotjungmori passages converges to combine with particular lyrics through the mid and late 20th century. A good example is the epilogue (huildam) that concludes pansori performance. In addition, it also appears in the form of some ‘background lyrics’ by combining with lyrics such as background lyrics for Chunhyang’s mother in Chunhyangga or background lyrics for the crow in fighting for high seat scene in Soogoongga. However, the epilogue in this era is often referred to as a different rhythmic pattern. For example, in recordings by Jung Ung-min, Park Bongsul or of Lim Bang-ul’s Jeokbyeokga, the epilogue called Jungmori. After the reduction of the number of eotjungmori passages at the end of the 20th century, eotjungmori passages that converged to combine with a particular lyric became completely fixed while still exhibiting a hand-down pattern. The end of the 20th century was the time when the terminology for the epilogue that had been referred to by various names including eotjungmori, jungjungmori, jungmori, and eotmori through mid and late 20th century became standardized as eotjungmori. On the other hand, the musical features of eotjungmori passages showed a general similarity regardless of the school or singer. Except for the sound that makes a one-time appearance among the emergent sounds, eotjungmori passages contain the sound of “sol,” “do ”, “re ”, “mi ”, “fa ”, “sol ”, “la ” and all end with “do ”. In comparison to other passages, the appearances of sigimsae or yoseong are relatively rare, but there are some suggestions of chuseong in the progression of “So”-“Do.” Also, in sequential descent progression such as “mi ”-“re ”-“do ” or “sol ”-“re ”-“do ”, it is characterized by a thick yoseong of “re .” The main melodic features are leap progression and sequential descent progression. For leap progression, regardless of the direction of the leap, the leap is mainly 4 or 5 intervals, and sequential descent progression leads to sigimsae or repetition of same note. These musical features are the characteristics of ujo and are universal characteristics of pansori eotjungmori which are commonly found today. Through this, it was found that the musical features were passed down without a great change, unlike the process in which the lyric of eotjungmori passage became fixed. In other words, it is in the middle of the 20th century that passages with eotjungmori rhythm in pansori were used at the end of each batang and the epilogue was typically sung in place of lyrics.

At the forefront of the various dynamic processes that contributed to the expansion of the British empire during the eighteenth century were constituents of several different elites. These powerful groups, both at home and abroad, held the levers that served to regulate and determine the form and direction taken by British activity in the wider world. Within metropolitan society, a political elite dominated by the landowning classes defined the features of state development and plotted the general course taken by commercial activity, diplomacy, and military action; a mercantile elite supervised and directed the growth of overseas trade; and a financial elite provided much of the capital and resources to support both the state and private enterprise at home and abroad. There was, of course, considerable overlap between these leading sections of British society, and this only served further to concentrate power and influence at the core of the empire.

How the Old World Ended: The Anglo-Dutch-American Revolution, 1500-1800. By Jonathan Scott. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 392. $35.00 hardcover, $16.99 Kindle).To Begin the World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe. By Matthew Lockwood. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 506. $30.00 hardcover, $15.71 Kindle).WHEN future historians write the history of our own time, a major theme, it seems safe to say, will be the awareness that we live in a moment of disruption on a planetary scale. Exactly what the historians of tomorrow make of that fact is hard to say. As Jonathan Scott and Matthew Lockwood argue in the books under review here, two things seems clear. The disruptions of the twenty-first century did not begin yesterday, and the North American colonies that became the United States are an important part of the story.As the long title of How the Old World Ended suggests, Scott's focus is the early modern Netherlands and England, with North America playing an increasingly important role as the eighteenth century progressed. It was here, Scott maintains, in what he calls the “water world” of the North Sea and its Atlantic periphery, that Europeans first liberated themselves from the “production and demographic limits of pre-industrial agriculture” (3, 37). Key to this transformation was a shared Anglo-Dutch culture of commercial, agricultural, and industrial innovation, which allowed the two western European powers to feed populations far in excess of what their own farmers had been able to produce during the Middle Ages. Access to water mattered too, giving Dutch and English merchants, producers, and consumers the ability to buy and sell goods in markets elsewhere in Europe and, eventually, across the Atlantic and around the world. By the sixteenth century, the Dutch had already escaped the “Malthusian trap of finite resources,” and the English were not far behind (37).In the second of the book's three parts, Scott turns to the Calvinist-dominated Protestantism that England, Scotland, and the Netherlands all had in common. From the late sixteenth century, that shared culture opened the way for innovators in each country to exchange ideas in politics, theology, science, agriculture, manufacturing, banking, and commerce, sometimes doing so competitively but often acting in concert. During the second half of the seventeenth century, entanglements between the two powers triggered the Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674. As Scott correctly notes, all three were in important respects civil wars. Of even greater moment, in what Scott labels the Anglo-Dutch Revolution of 1649–1702, the same ties produced two political unions: the federated Anglo-Dutch Republic of 1649 to 1653 and the personal union that accompanied the accession of the Dutch Stadtholder William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1689.This Anglo-Dutch moment led to the consolidation of what, in the book's third and final section, Scott terms Britain's “maritime monarchy” (215). As its place in his tripartite structure suggests, Scott sees the eighteenth-century British Empire as an Anglo-Dutch creation, like its French and Spanish rivals a maritime dominion but with a cultural, economic, and political dynamism that the Bourbon powers lacked. Feeding that dynamism were Britain's North American and West Indian colonies, whose growing wealth and population played an enormously important role—thanks in no small part to the Navigation Laws first enacted during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the previous century—in the industrialization of England and Scotland. By the time of the American Revolution, the British Empire had become an “English-speaking empire of customers” (283). Although doomsayers predicted that the loss of the thirteen American colonies would be the empire's undoing, the commercial relations forged by more than a century of “supply and demand [were] sufficiently robust to survive independence” (275). Rather than destroying the British factory system and the global commercial dominance that was the result, the American Revolution ensured its success.As he makes his way through this narrative, Scott frequently notes the “eye-watering human cost of early modern European empires,” directing readers to Africa and the Americas in particular (161). Scott is also cognizant of industrialization's ecological and environmental toll (28). Ultimately, however, the story that he tells is one of individual liberation and empowerment. In the conclusion, he has this to say of the Industrial Revolution: Without it we would still be peasant farmers living in a village rather than inhabitants of a city. Our lives would still be governed by the seasonal agricultural calendar, and the constantly evolving daily cycle of light and darkness, rather than the never-ending flow of hourly work time, glow of electricity, and electronic devices which [sic] never sleep, accompanied by aircraft which fly us from one season to another (300).Scott does not ask his readers, even rhetorically, which world they would rather inhabit, the old or the new. But there seems to be little doubt how he thinks most would answer.If Scott makes the case for modernity, one way to read Matthew Lockwood's To Begin the World Over Again is as an extended brief against it, especially modernity as enshrined in the democratic principles of the American Revolution. Although Britain does not appear in the title, Lockwood's chief concern is the British reaction after the entry of France and Spain turned the Revolutionary War into a global struggle for imperial dominance and, many Britons feared, survival. The result, according to the book's title, “devastated the globe.” In thirteen chapters, Lockwood surveys the effects of this devastation, from the Gordon Riots that literally devastated London during the spring of 1780 to Ireland, Honduras, Peru, the Crimean Peninsula, Sierra Leone, India, Australia, and China. For readers versed in British and imperial history, some parts of this story will be familiar, others not so much. Regardless of the details, the outcome was the same. Wherever the effects of the American Revolution were felt, writes Lockwood, the ensuing turmoil inaugurated “an authoritarian counter-revolution that expanded Britain's empire while fatally weakening France and Spain” (7).Having written about Britain's counter-revolution myself, I am sympathetic with what Lockwood wants to do.1 There are, however, problems with attributing most of the agency for that reaction to the American Revolution. Although debunking the American founding has a long and distinguished pedigree, most such accounts focus on the costs that the revolution imposed in North America and its immediate vicinity. By expanding the revolution's costs to include actions that Britain took in India, Australia, and Asia, Lockwood asks his readers to accept a much more capacious litany of woe—one where a “revolution in favor of liberty in one corner of the map initiated a reactionary revolution in the wider world, inflicting new suffering and new restraints on people for whom freedom and independence were not available” (7). Because the American Revolution in the quoted passage is the subject, the thing that activates the British reaction in the predicate, the revolution is also what produces the suffering on the part of people who were neither free nor independent in the participle that follows. Britain, of course, was the power that inflicted most of the suffering—and much of the suffering that it inflicted occurred on the opposite side of the world—but the sentence's structure casts the British as supporting actors, who played the roles that they did because the revolution's American and pro-American dramatis personae gave them no choice. Is that really “how” the American Revolution devastated the globe?Similar questions of agency and causation arise from Lockwood's discussion of the Tupac Amaru revolt in Spanish Peru and the Russian annexation of Crimea. There is no question that both crises were devastating. The Tupac Amaru revolt claimed an estimated 100,000 Indigenous and 40,000 Creole lives (177). In neither case, however, were Britain and America directly involved, nor did the two crises have anything to do with the principles of the American Revolution—or for that matter with each other. Tupac Amaru's main grievance involved fiscal burdens imposed by the Spanish Bourbon reforms of the 1760s and 1770s, while the Crimean conquest of 1783 was one episode in the centuries-long rivalry between the Russian and Ottoman empires for control of the Black Sea. While Lockwood is aware of both sets of facts, what matters is that the two crises occurred during the War of American Independence. “Once more,” he writes of Crimea, “the American Revolution had played an important role” (232).What Lockwood hopes to achieve with this sprawling analysis is not entirely clear. In the introduction, he says that one of his goals is to move past the “idea of American exceptionalism, of the United States as a uniquely moral and chosen nation,” yet the American Revolution is at the center of his book's argument and title (4). The result is not so much a repudiation of the idea as a reworking, one that replaces exceptional triumph with exceptional catastrophe while keeping Americans in the leading roles and with most of the agency. In the book's final chapter, “The Dawn of the Century of Humiliation,” Lockwood retells the familiar story of Britain's forced opening of China during the 1780s and 1790s. Although Americans were sometimes present, notably during the 1784 Lady Hughes affair, when merchants from the East India Company and Imperial officials at Canton nearly came to blows after a Company ship accidentally killed a Chinese sailor during an artillery salute, the British were the ones who took the initiative and played the dominant role in shaping the outcome. Undaunted, Lockwood sees the Chinese humiliation that followed the Lady Hughes affair as yet another indication of how “the effects of the American Revolution … rippled out from the Atlantic, aiding the expansion of the British Empire, and undermining its imperial rivals” (480).When a book so obviously misses the mark, it is tempting to look for ways to improve it. One suggestion would be to replace the “devastation” in the title with something along the lines of “fragmentation” or “fracture.” During the half century after the revolution, the period covered by Lockwood's book, the United States lacked the capacity to project its power much beyond its own borders. Its democratic example extended farther, but there too the political challenge to Britain and Europe's other anciens régimes paled in comparison to the threat posed a decade later by the revolution in France. To say that the American Revolution caused devastation in either area on a global scale strains credibility. What the revolution did do was to fragment the world's leading maritime power, with the independent United States claiming perhaps a third of Britain's prewar merchant marine. The response of Britain and Europe's other colonial powers to that fragmentation most certainly did have global consequences, some of which, though by no means all—for example, the rise of antislavery in Britain and the United States—were devastating. Although not the book that Lockwood's title suggests, the apparent near death and subsequent recovery of the British Empire is closer to the storyline in the book that he has written.Ironically, despite his positive take on modernity, Jonathan Scott has the stronger case for the American Revolution as a globally devastating event. Whereas it would take nearly a century for the United States to rival and eventually surpass Britain as a world power, Scott's American empire of consumers played a role in the industrialization of Britain that was both immediate and direct. The origins of that pairing of supply and demand lay in the decades before the revolution, but the transatlantic relationship reached its zenith during the global Anglo-American “settler revolution” that began, according to James Belich, with the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 and lasted until the Second World War.2 It does not require much imagination to see a straightforward connection between the Industrial Revolution; the intensification of African slavery and the slave trade, both in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas; the dispossession of Indigenous peoples on a global scale; and the climate crisis of our own time.If there is one point on which Scott and Lockwood concur, it is that the world that the American Revolution created was indeed new. That new world is also, they would surely agree, the world that we inhabit today. What will future historians make of that fact? Will they emphasize the cultures of invention that loom so large in the final section of Scott's book, and will they say that industrial capitalism's restless spirit of innovation, which was what brought humanity to the brink of disaster, was also what pulled us back? Or will the costs, environmental as well as human, seem like the only things worth talking about? The answer, unfortunately, is terrifyingly difficult to predict. Only time will tell.

‘IMPERIALISM is no word for scholars’, imperial historian Sir Keith Hancock is reported to have said.1 He was thinking of the pitfalls of definition; the problem with terms such as ‘imperialism’, ‘decolonisation’ and ‘informal empire’ is that their definitions can become so elastic that they cease to define.2 One might well echo Hancock's sentiment today, because the search for the end of ‘the British empire’ during the ‘decolonisation period’ has led to an artificial division of the post-Second World War years into a period of ‘declining empire’ and one of ‘post-empire’, in which the links between the two have been very poorly conceptualised. This division has distorted our reading of the decades following 1945 and has deflected attention from the many continuities in Britain's relations with the wider world by giving empire, and more especially the loss of it, too great a prominence in British and world affairs. The alternative interpretation outlined here plays down the importance of decolonisation and emphasises the hardy survival of Britain as an international player that never ceased to seek a global role and that retained manifold international interests and responsibilities, together with the political and security capabilities necessary to support them.3 This interpretation de-emphasises the common, even hackneyed, picture of a sudden shift from empire to post-empire in the 1960s, a shift that in reality never fully took place, and thus challenges the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ view of empire that struggles to capture the more complex reality of Britain's world role in the last half century.

"England and America Against the World":Empire and the USA in Edwin J. Brett's Boys of England, 1866-99 Christopher Banham (bio) Recent decades have witnessed a sharp increase in interest over how the possession of an empire impacted upon the society and culture of Britain itself. Boys' periodical literature has been acknowledged as one of the cultural forms upon which the effects of imperialism were most evident. Consequently, the British empire has become the single most developed theme of study in the historiography of Victorian boys' periodicals. Within this avenue of enquiry, debate has lately begun to emerge over the way one paper in particular, Boys of England, portrayed the empire. Boys of England was the leading boys' periodical of the nineteenth century. It was issued weekly from 1866 to 1899 by publisher and former Chartist Edwin J. Brett, initially from the Fleet Street offices of the Newsagents' Publishing Company, and later from Brett's own 'Boys of England Office'. It was the first boys' periodical of its kind. It boasted a heady mix of exciting fiction, informative non-fiction, vivid illustrations, and free gifts and competitions, all delivered with refreshing conviviality. The paper was large, and a full 16 pages long, yet cost only one penny. It proved enormously popular, chiefly amongst working-class boys. Fellow publisher John Allingham later recalled that "when [Boys of England] first made its appearance in 1866, it went with such a rush that it was difficult for newsagents to get their supplies."1 Within a few short weeks of its debut Boys of England had achieved a weekly sale of 150,000. This increased to a remarkable 250,000 during the 1870s. The paper began a publishing revolution. Hundreds of periodicals imitating it were issued by rival publishers over the following decades, although none matched its success. Traditionally, scholarly opinion has not deemed empire to have been a particularly significant factor within Boys of England, nor within most boys' papers published in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Historians, such as Patrick Dunae and John Springhall, have argued that for these periodicals empire was "simply a bizarre backdrop for . . . quixotic [End Page 151] escapades" and "never really more than a colourful backcloth to . . . tales of ethnocentric adventure."2 The exception to this rule was The Boy's Own Paper, launched by the Religious Tract Society in 1879, whose authors and readers embraced empire from the outset. It was not until the 1890s that publishers, most notably Alfred Harmsworth, began to launch a glut of periodicals preoccupied with empire. They offered wild adventure, staunch patriotism and strong racism, timed to exploit growing popular enthusiasm for imperialism, and attracted a large sale amongst eager boys. In the wake of these new periodicals the popularity of Boys of England began to wane, and soon the paper was discontinued. However, recent studies, particularly Kelly Boyd's Manliness and the Boys Story Paper: a Cultural History, 1855-1940 (2003), have begun to challenge some of these established ideas. Dedicating more attention to periodicals of the type published by Brett, Boyd argues that Boys of England's attitude towards imperialism was actually quite complex. Far from trivialising empire, "publishers like Edwin J. Brett celebrated empire with characters who roamed the globe carrying British ideas and arrogance in their baggage."3 The unrestricted wandering of these characters, Boyd claims, reflected Britain's favour for free trade imperialism. Notwithstanding recent reappraisals of Brett's output, the historiography of boys' periodical literature has yet to recognise the true nature, and depth, of the relationship between Boys of England, the British empire and the wider world. Although Boys of England was less preoccupied with empire than many of its rivals, it was more sensitive to the contemporary spirit of imperialism than has hitherto been acknowledged; furthermore, its relative inattentiveness towards empire played only a small part in its demise. Moreover, it appears that empire has proved too constraining a concept for historians of boys' papers. In the wider historiography of the British empire two concepts are becoming increasingly important: the "British world" and the "Anglo world." Each offers an alternative to traditional interpretations of the composition and workings of the British empire...