This article attends to the abolition of the privy purses and princely privileges of ex-rulers achieved between May 1967 to December 1971 in a controversial constitutional episode, in a period of transition for Indian democracy. Moving beyond the usual figures under focus, namely Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her Principal Secretary P.N. Haksar, it brings to fore a wider cast of characters and their concerns during this campaign. Second, it seeks to take the established binary between the old of the Indian National Congress and the new of Indira’s Congress (Ruling) following the split in 1969, to stand for a wider generational passage of time at both international and internal levels. Third, probing this overlapping interaction, it presents it as one among final episodes of independent India emerging from its British world of 1947, whose relevance can be sketched beyond pressure politics inside a party and mass politics outside it. Finally, it presents this episode as a prism through which one can see the end of the ‘first phase’ of India’s democracy and one of its inherited institutions.

This article examines the history of an overlooked monument to the so-called ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ dedicated at Immingham, Humberside, in September 1925. Drawing upon contemporary press coverage as well as the rather limited extant archival record, the article connects the monument to overlapping local, national and international contexts, including the Anglo-American diplomatic rapprochement of the post-1890 period, the Mayflower Tercentenary of 1920, the post-1918 economic challenges of Hull and the surrounding region, and the transatlantic tensions which emerged after the war (especially around naval disarmament and the Treaty of Versailles). In doing so, the article shifts attention away from the far more familiar south coast geography associated with commemorations of the Pilgrim Fathers, it reveals the important role played in the project by civic and municipal elites, and at its broadest it uncovers what might be reasonably termed the local history of Anglo-American relations in the post-1918 period.

This article explores British efforts to organize a Chinese section for the famous Great Exhibition of 1851. It details the difficult negotiations and compromises that took place among British administrators, Chinese imperial authorities, and local merchants in order to secure a Chinese display that promoted the imagined virtues of free trade. The article argues that Britain’s failure to solicit the active support of Chinese elites reflected the strained commercial and political relations in the period between the two Opium Wars. By probing the global origins of Great Exhibition, the article provides a more comprehensive picture of Sino-British encounters in the mid-nineteenth century.

This article explores British decolonisation through the lens of the first meeting of Britain’s Heads of Missions (Ambassadors and High Commissioners) in East and Central Africa in May 1965. The meeting gives a unique insight into the thoughts and ambitions of a select group of senior diplomats as they offered their ideas of what policy should be and assessed Britain’s historical and contemporary relationship with Africa. Mid-1965 was a moment when multiple, if limited, options were available as the British government sought to reconfigure relationships and preserve influence in former colonies. The meeting is significant in a number of ways. Firstly, the meeting was an expression of power relations between different government departments in Whitehall, with the Commonwealth Relations Office valuing Africa more than the powerful Foreign Office; secondly, it reinforced the diplomats’ sense of their position as supposed ‘experts’ on Africa, more advanced and rational than the Africans with whom they worked; thirdly, it revealed official beliefs that Britain was the more powerful partner in relationships with Africa, able to exert influence though ongoing bilateral relationships and the Commonwealth.

Recent scholarship on early Sino-British relations has begun challenging the longstanding projection of inevitability upon the First Anglo-Chinese War (1839–1842) by illuminating diverse opinions within each side rather than highlighting an inherent tension between “modern” Britain and “traditional” China. However, the assumption that the Macartney Embassy (1792–1794) served as the first major step toward war has gone largely unchallenged because its diplomatic drama and economic disputes appear to affirm the British and Qing Empires’ supposedly irreconcilable differences. This article examines Britons’ reactions to the Macartney Embassy through travelogues, periodicals, and diplomatic documents to reconstruct the Embassy free from the hindsight of war and the imposition of free trade upon the Qing in the Treaty of Nanjing (1842). It argues that late eighteenth-century Britons variably conceived of the Embassy as a success, dismissed it as inconsequential, or weaponized it for domestic political criticisms. They accordingly supported both optimism in the future of Sino-British relations and a deferent stance toward Britain’s Qing counterparts. The idea that the Embassy exemplified hostility between Britain and China only came about through John Barrow’s reactionary writings during the early nineteenth century that sought to defend Macartney’s conduct by foregrounding the Qing’s apparently impolite behavior. Barrow’s views took root after accounts of the Qing’s treatment of the Amherst Embassy (1816–1817) depicted this behavior as a pattern. In this way, Britons’ initial reactions to the Macartney Embassy complicate clear notions of a linear, causal relationship between the Embassy and the war. They rather suggest that these notions were invented through a misuse of hindsight by early nineteenth-century Britons and solidified by later historians.