British Empire Research Articles

The creative–destructive force of hurricanes: evidence from technological adoption in colonial Jamaican sugar estates

AbstractWhile in the early part of the nineteenth-century Jamaica was one of the world’s leading sugar producers, the abolition of slavery, the flooding of sugar markets with cheap European beet sugar, and the equalization and finally elimination of sugar import duties across the British empire led to a need for more efficient ways to produce sugar. However, it has been widely noted that Jamaica sugar estates were late in adopting more efficient production techniques, arguably due to inadequate financing. This paper investigates what role the destructive forces of hurricanes may have played in inducing Jamaica to finally modernize its sugar production. To this end, we combine a geo-referenced exhaustive data set of Jamaican sugar estates with a measure of localized hurricane damage constructed from historical hurricane tracks over the period 1882 to 1930. Our econometric analysis shows that hurricane strikes increased the probability that a surviving estate upgraded its sugar processing technology, particularly when the price of sugar was high and the price of the other main exporting crop (bananas) was low. Additionally, while a government hurricane loan programme working through local loan banks did help plantations to adopt new machinery, this depended on the damage not being too large.

Francis Bacon, colonisation, and the limits of Atlanticism

ABSTRACT Historical interest in the ideologies behind the ‘first’ British empire have tended, for very understandable reasons, to look towards the colonies of the eastern seaboard of North America and the Caribbean. By contrast, this study of the imperial vision held by the English philosopher and politician Francis Bacon (1561–1626) emphasises a different geography of empire. In an investigation of what Bacon took to be the implications of the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland in the person of King James VI & I, and in the pacification of Ireland following the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War in 1603 and the Flight of Earls in 1607, it argues that Bacon’s own imperial ambitions were ultimately directed towards the annexation of the Low Countries and the founding of a new British imperium in western Europe.

Text and Tradition: The Dynasty of Villarvattom among Syrian Christians in Kerala, India

The present paper introduces, inventories and interrogates prevailing narratives about the complex trajectories through which a putative Syrian Christian dynasty named Villarvattom has taken root in communal genealogies and the popular imagination of Kerala. The paper, by examining historical evidence, argues that the existing historical documents compel us to consider it as a retrospectively invented and imagined tradition necessitated and facilitated by the unique socio-political structures of Kerala viz. the ideational complexes wrought by caste and allied practices, the dislocation caused by successive colonial regimes and the overall crisis experienced by the indigenous Christian community. The paper surveys the present state of literature, discusses explanatory models, points to the possibility of cultural introjection and seeks ways in which the study can be taken forward more comprehensively and productively so that we gain perceptive insights into both the ecclesiastical and secular histories of Kerala. The paper argues that it is an invented tradition, a defence mechanism collectively, and perhaps unconsciously, evolved by the beleaguered Syrian Christians under the Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial rule, which had inflicted debilitating blows to the power and glory enjoyed by this community.

Trapped between religion and ethnicity: identity politics against the Baloch in Iran and Pakistan

ABSTRACT This article delves into the intricate connection between societal identity markers and the politico-socio-economic conditions of the Baloch people in Pakistan and Iran. It explores the structural conditions of identity that contribute to oppressive dichotomies in centre–periphery relations, ultimately fuelling internal conflicts. Balochistan, historically marginalized and overlooked, endured a complex geopolitical history as it shifted between empires, notably the Persian and British Empires. In the nineteenth century, agreements between the Persian and British Empires outlined the modern-day borders, fragmenting the Baloch nation into regions now administered by Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The aftermath of this partition led to permanent societal tension, impacting the internal security of these states. The article highlights the struggle of the divided Baloch people for equal politico-socio-economic rights, emphasizing the states’ challenges in legitimizing their authority. The Baloch, residing in divided borders, express their grievances against Iran and Pakistan, each grappling with identity-based conflicts rooted in sectarianism (Iran) and ethnicity (Pakistan). The narrative explores the complex relationship between the Baloch people and the respective states, shedding light on diverse perspectives regarding marginalization and discrimination.

Sport, identities, and politics at the 2023 Island Games, Guernsey

ABSTRACT This article discusses the 2023 (NatWest) Island Games in Guernsey, the latest iteration of a sporting tournament held every two years in Atlantic Rim polities since 1985. The event’s participants include UK local authorities, crown dependencies, and British overseas territories. Significantly, non-British and non-Commonwealth polities such as the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Åland also take part, thus allowing UK and Commonwealth jurisdictions a means of performing national identity and diplomacy alongside non-Commonwealth polities. The author explores the potential and limits of this in an era where the Commonwealth (formerly British Empire) Games is struggling for survival.

From Support to Satyagraha: The Transformative Impact of Boer War on Gandhi and the Indian Freedom Struggle

Gandhi’s experience during the Second Boer War was radically transformative, from espousing the British cause early on to complete disillusionment with the British Empire. Setting up the Indian Ambulance Corps to assist British soldiers was Gandhi’s first experience of organising a mass movement. The racist legislation after the war and the treatment of Indians at the hands of the British exposed Gandhi to the deeply racial character of British imperialism. The events that unfolded during the war and the post-war laid the groundwork for the evolution of Satyagraha, which later became the principal mode of protest against the British.

Passenger Rolling Stock of Indian Railways in the First Half-Century of Their Operation

In India, as in many countries, railways originated as industrial gauge tracks for the transportation of ore, timber, stone, and other building materials. These were the first industrial railways in India to deliver supplies to construction sites, in particular, Chintadripet in Madras (1835), Red Hill Railroad line (1837), Godavari Dam Construction Railway (1845), and others. Initially, the promoters of the construction of railways, based on the general social and economic situation in the country, did not count on the development of passenger traffic, taking into account the virtually impoverished situation of the vast majority of the population. Efforts were focused on freight transportation. The colonialists proceeded from the need to develop railways as an important exploitation tool for exporting the country’s natural resources to the parent country and to the world market. Throughout almost the entire period of British colonial rule, passenger transportation was intended for a narrow stratum of colonizers and a few of the richest representatives of the country’s indigenous population. By the 1860s, there was a system of dividing passenger traffic on the railways of India into four classes. Saloon coaches were used to serve the ruling elite. The difference in travel conditions in luxury saloon coaches and first-class compartment carriages in comparison with third- and fourth-class carriages was huge. It reflected the social class structure of Indian society. At the same time, railway passenger transportation did not affect the interests of the majority of the population at all, as with their level of wealth they could not afford to travel by rail at all, remaining outside the line of progress in transport of the 19th century.

On the Origins of Invalidation of British Colonial Legislation by Colonial Courts: The Van Diemen’s Land Dog Act Controversy of the 1840s – Part One

ABSTRACT By 1865 British Imperial governments had accepted that colonial courts had the authority to invalidate colonial statutes which contravened the relevant colony’s constitution. This situation arose notwithstanding the lack of any express grant of such jurisdiction to colonial courts in Imperial or colonial legislation. This paper evaluates the first instance of a colonial court asserting that jurisdiction, during the Dog Act crisis in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in the 1840s. Part one of the paper charts the background to, conduct of and judgment in the relevant litigation. The second part, which will appear in a future issue of this journal, explores the consequential attempts of the colony’s Governor to remove the judges from office and to re-enact the invalidated colonial law. The suggestion made is that the Dog Act controversy provides considerable insight into how, despite the absence of any explicit statutory grant of such jurisdiction, the power of judicial review of colonial legislation by colonial courts became established as an orthodox element of British colonial constitutional law in the latter nineteenth century.

Just who wanted dominion home rule?: ‘moderates’ and the Irish War of Independence

AbstractThis article discusses political ‘moderates’, those individuals who reacted to the turmoil of the War of Independence by coalescing around a vision of a dominion of Ireland within the British Empire, with appropriate safeguards for minorities. It will consider how reformist gentry, parliamentary and former unionist elements came together to bring about their preferred settlement. Through statistical examination of the membership of the Irish Dominion League, the leading moderate movement, it will establish the political backgrounds, religion and social class of supporters, and demonstrate the various means by which moderates worked as intermediaries between British forces and the rebels. Southern unionists made efforts to avoid working with moderates and to retain a distinct political identity, and, ultimately, divisions within the movement, and the changing structure of Irish politics, inhibited the creation of an effective moderate party.

The Stauntons of Galway in China: Irish Catholic networks and the expansion of the British Empire in Asia

AbstractGeorge Leonard Staunton, who travelled on the first British embassy to China in 1793, and his son George Thomas Staunton, who translated the Chinese legal code into English, are well-known figures in the history of China. Their British identity was constructed by George Thomas to conceal the family's Irish Catholic background, but in fact George Leonard used that background for the benefit of an imperial career that propelled him from Galway to the West Indies, India and, finally, China. It enabled him to win the support of the papacy for the British embassy to China, and his son to learn Chinese and make a career as a merchant and translator. Their story shows some of the mechanisms that connected the nineteenth-century British Empire in Asia to the Catholic Church which had been the great global institution of the early modern age. Moreover, a distinctively Irish concern with property law can be seen to have influenced George Thomas's great work on Chinese law. The Stauntons’ imperial careers made the family wealthy and much of this wealth came back to County Galway.

Four Theses on the Real and Imaginary British Empire, 1697–1829

Four Theses on the Real and Imaginary British Empire, 1697–1829

Civil Service Rules: (Post)Colonial Memoir and the Raj Revival, 1970–1985

In the 1970s, the India Office Archive within the British Library began inviting the last generation of the Indian Civil Service and Indian Political Service to commit their experiences to written record. Running until the mid-1980s and eventually producing 135 manuscript memoirs, this archive offers a unique insight into the end of the British Empire, as seen a generation hence. This article argues that these memoirs, generated in a time of crisis and fracture within British national identity, are not only vital historical sources but are a significant body of creative work within the context of acute cultural production of narratives of Empire known as the ‘Raj Revival’. Moreover, in their acknowledgement, inclusion and direct dialogue with colonial fictions from Kipling to Forster, as well as their own aesthetic form, these memoirs are part of the long tendency towards the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and life writing within the historical publishing cultures of British India.

State formation, diplomacy and sport: the British Empire Games, Ireland and Northern Ireland, 1930–38

AbstractThis paper considers the interconnected practices of state formation, diplomacy, national identity and sport through an examination of ‘Irish’ involvement in the British Empire Games of 1930, 1934 and 1938. These events had a contradictory role in bolstering diplomatic relations between those who were committed to the empire but also in expressing the aspirations of those who sought independence from it, or a distinct identity within it. State formation and diplomacy played out in sporting contexts — which we term sportcraft — and this process was especially complex in post-partition Ireland. In the period under examination, a gradual but significant hardening of ideologies and identities occurred in certain sports on the island, notably athletics, mirroring the effects of partition and reflecting British and unionist political actions and sportive interests. Original archival and documentary material is presented from state archives in Dublin, London, Belfast and Ottawa, and from official sports collections in Birmingham, London, Stirling, Melbourne (Australia), Hamilton (Canada) and Lausanne (Switzerland). This demonstrates that by the early 1920s, government officials and sports administrators had already recognised the propaganda functions and utility of sport for state formation purposes and for issues of political control, jurisdiction and territorial boundaries.

The Return of the Native: James MacPherson, Improving Strategies and Clanship Imagination in Late Eighteenth-century Badenoch

This paper examines a neglected facet of the life of the poet and colonial agent James Macpherson (1736–1796). Better known today as the ‘translator’ of Ossian, James Macpherson was also a political writer and MP who enjoyed a long association with the East India Company (EIC). In the 1780s, James returned to his native Badenoch, bought an estate, and played a decisive role in the reconfiguration of the area through military recruitments, land arbitration and new strategies of landownership and improvements. Studying James Macpherson's relation to land and kinship reveals a more complex and ambivalent man than previously acknowledged in existing literature. Drawing from official and private records, as well as Gaelic material, this paper uncovers the extent to which his reestablishment was the product of his imperial activities, as was visible in the reinjection of external capital in land. James's political connections in London were instrumental in assisting Duncan Macpherson (later of Cluny), son of the exiled Macpherson clan chief, in recovering the forfeited estates. Enjoying popularity with his tenants, James was reluctant to impose purely commercial improvements: his considerable East Indian profits provided him with financial emancipation from unpredictable land revenues and the ability to preserve his image of a paternalist landowner locally. However, this paper also engages with James Macpherson's ideology and recreation of a mythical past serving his own interests. Offering valuable help to the entrepreneurial Macpherson gentry also involved in India and America, James took a decisive role in offering advise and support to large-scale improvement projects. His adoption of a lavish lifestyle and conscious use of entertainment, made possible by the influx of colonial wealth, enabled him to challenge the old social order, juxtapose himself with the Cluny Macpherson and recreate a post-clanship culture serving the interests of the colonial gentry. The controversial perception of James Macpherson, whose role oscillated between that of nouveau riche and ‘clan champion’, sheds a new light on the impact of the British Empire on Badenoch, and the Highlands at large. A closer look at his reestablishment in Badenoch, a county traditionally seen by historians as an example of effective management without mass depopulation, provides new perspectives on the intersection of late-eighteenth century empire, improvement, and clanship.

Settler Colonial Classifications of Edibility

The pastoral economies introduced during the colonial invasion have radically transformed Australian diets, cultures, and ecosystems. Stolen land was tenured to settlers and emancipated convicts to develop profitable and productive enterprises for the British Empire. Land rights and animal care are intrinsically linked to modern food systems, yet there is a gap in Australian literature regarding the legacy of colonial pastoralism and its connection to current food systems. This essay questions how introduced species evolved to command the Australian diet. Wallabies and kangaroos were legally relegated to national emblems, and thus inedible. Their conditions of being, whether edible, iconic, or wild, were dictated by the Commonwealth Government. The taboo nature of these native marsupials leaves them largely unconsumed, and therefore, unprotected. Modern conditions of edibility are less concerned with physical metabolic matters, instead driven by historic cultural attitudes and political and economic motives. Nourishment was commodified. My research uses Tasmanian legal archives in conjunction with cookbooks and popular iconography to trace the historical legacies of foodways since the invasion. Scholarship around waste, sociology, ecology, and food justice and sovereignty are incorporated to consider how modern agricultural practices perpetuate violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and ecosystems. Modern agriculture affects every being on the planet, both human and more-than-human. My research goal is to encourage people to question their metabolic practices to ascertain how everyday acts of consumption implicate them within unjust systems. Though consumptive wallaby culling is legal, the industry remains privatized, and Indigenous Australians have little agency to influence how their native species are used, and who profits from their utility. By sharing these concerns with researchers from a broad range of disciplines, I hope to connect with individuals who can help to make future metabolic matters more inclusive, more ethical, and more sustainable.

‘A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Jamaica’: Pseudobiblical Style and Jamaican Proto-nationalism

Abstract Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, now widely recognized as a watershed in the history of the Atlantic world, fundamentally shaped discussions about Jamaica’s political and legal status within the British empire. Here, I analyze a little-known narrative of the rebellion written by Jewish newspaper editor Sidney Levien in pseudobiblical style, with almost every sentence of the account echoing the language of the King James Version of the Bible. I locate Levien’s narrative within a literary tradition that used pseudobiblical style to describe contemporary political life, especially in America. The literary tradition, identified by historian Eran Shalev, transposed contemporary politics into events of biblical proportion. By using pseudobiblical style, Levien advanced a sense of Jamaica’s importance in nineteenth-century political imagination. While many accounts conceptualized the rebellion as a struggle between White landowners and Black laborers, Levien refused to present Jamaica as a White fatherland or a Black republic.

Regulatory capture in the British Empire: The British South Africa Company and the redefinition of property rights in Southern Africa

We study the redefinition of property rights under colonial rule with a focus on state and business relations. We study the case of the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and how it was able to legitimise its claims to land and minerals in two non-settler colonies in Africa: Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The study shows that the BSAC was able to wield considerable influence over these political processes. The British government thereby came to favour the interests of the BSAC over those of other actors, including settlers and African subjects in the colonies, despite having the knowledge that many of the company’s claims had no legal basis. The findings show how the dynamic relationship between state and firms can evolve into one that sees the public interests subjugated.

Exploring the history of colonial towns as centres of national integration: The example of Kafanchan Town, 1926-2011

This paper is a critical inquiry into the process and evolution and urbanization of Kafanchan Town from 1926 to 2011. It is based on the appreciation of the impact of British colonial rule in Nigeria as against the usual dismissive Marxist approach to studying European activities in Africa. The research methodology adopted is an interpretation of both primary (oral/archival) and secondary (published) sources to reconstruct the history of the town. On concluding the work, the analysis of both primary and secondary sources traced the history of the town to the construction of the railway line from the eastern part of Nigeria that culminated into a station located on an uninhabited plot of land. This station is significant because it provided a system of transportation that serves as a link among Nigerians from different backgrounds and also precipitated the process of urbanization in this area. The town has evolved into a centre for national integration. From its beginning, it was cosmopolitan in nature thereby serving as a critical area in enhancing unity in a multicultural society like Nigeria. It started with the sheds erected as quarters for the construction workers and staff of the Nigerian Railways who were composed of diverse ethnic groups; some of the early workers were Yoruba, Igbo, Edo, Tiv, Hausa/Fulani, and the bulk of the natives. The paper therefore posits that colonial infrastructures as part of its economy had a positive impact in knitting the socio-political fabrics of the Nigerian area. This, if properly harnessed, would turn the tide of the much needed national integration in our heterogonous society for a progressive development.

Duncan Tanner Essay Prize Winner 2023: A 'High Quality' Deal: The Business of British Comedy Television in Australia, 1960-90.

Historians of the late British empire often cite the 1960s and 1970s as a turning point in Commonwealth nationalisms, when British sentiment abroad was in major decline. This article investigates one exception to that phenomenon: Australians' continued appreciation for British television, especially British comedy television. While other historians have seen this as a symptom of 'cultural imperialism', this article argues that Australian stations purchased British comedies for complex commercial reasons that extended beyond imperial sentiment. Australian and British television stations worked together to bring British television programmes to Australia. Public and private British stations sold Australians programmes to finance their domestic activities, claiming their products were uniquely 'high quality'. Australian stations borrowed British language of 'high quality' to describe these programmes, a rhetoric which filtered through to how Australian viewers described their television preferences. Combining international business records with viewers' opinions, this article demonstrates the role media firms could play in positively framing consumers' attitudes to Britain even in the post-imperial era.

Representation of LGBTQIA in Bollywood Films

India produces more Hindi films than any other country. Film portrayals of society mirror that culture, which in turn shapes social attitudes. Hindi film, also referred to as Bollywood, exhibits strong societal roots. The Delhi High Court authorized homosexual behavior in the last ten years, but the Supreme Court later declared it to be unlawful. These modifications mirror modifications in social views. In this paper, we focus on how homosexuality is portrayed in Hindi films in relation to social attitudes about both male and female homosexuality. In India, cultural and social values and attitudes towards sexuality have historically been positive. However, during the 200 years of British colonial rule, these values and attitudes towards homosexuality and homosexual men and women became extremely negative and even punishable, in line with the prevalent Victorian views on sex and sexual activity. The literature has identified and documented several sexual descriptions and identities. In this essay, we discuss a tiny number of Hindi movies that deal with homosexuality. These representations have generally been unfavorable. We discuss the reasons why this would be the case as well as the effect that these portrayals might have on viewers.