Imperial Map Research Articles

Mapping Oysters and Making Oceans in the Northern Indian Ocean, 1880–1906

AbstractAt the turn of the twentieth century, most of the world’s pearls were extracted from rich oyster and coral reefs on the northern Indian Ocean rim. This paper returns to the sites of extraction, studying imperial maps made from 1889–1925 to delineate oyster reefs on the seafloor. Building from the submarine up, I draw on environmental, animal, and history of science studies to explore the work of mapping oceanic, animate space. Attending to the role of divers, whose labor was required to make the seafloor visible, and the lifecycles of oysters, which changed over time, I argue that the seafloor represents a kind of unruly terrain, out of both the reach and control of imperial authorities. The paper’s final section meditates on reading humans as part of Indian Ocean landscapes and the possibilities this offers for further comparative, transnational work in a materialist vein.

Place-name wars in Karabakh: Russian Imperial maps and political legitimacy in the Caucasus

ABSTRACT Place names play important ideological role in the modern Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh. Both sides use toponymic evidence to claim a prior occupation of the disputed territory. Azerbaijan relies on the Russian maps to prove that the Armenian population are recent newcomers. Armenians point out to the medieval documents to prove the opposite. This article attempts to reconcile the contradictory evidence used by both sides by looking at the transformation of place-naming practises in the wake of the emergence of a modern bureaucratic state. I argue that before the rise of modern bureaucratic state in Europe the place-naming was not within the realm of the state interest. The Russian conquest brought the uniformity of toponymic landscape into Caucasus where several toponymic landscapes coexisted in time and space. This resulted in elevation of one landscape into an official landscape and silencing of the other.

Imperial Cartography and National Mapping in Afghanistan

Afghanistan assumed its modern cartographic form in piecemeal fashion between the late 1860s and early 1890s in the context of British imperial boundary-making projects in South Asia and the Middle East. The bordering of Afghanistan was contextualized by the global British empire and multiple boundary conflicts and frontier anxieties involving the British and the French, German, Russian, and other imperial powers as well as local rulers. The fundamental point here is that the map of Afghanistan is a product of imperial and interimperial concerns, and it has not benefited the Afghan people. The map of Afghanistan may or may not have served the imperial purposes for which it was created, but more importantly, by uncritically accepting it and its imperial heritage, we Afghans have become victims of an imperial map of ourselves. Afghans and non-Afghans will benefit from directly confronting the coercive impact of imperial mapping agendas on the largely invisible people “on the map” of Afghanistan. This essay historicizes the production of maps of modern Afghanistan, exposing imperial and crypto-colonial influences upon our national cartography. In so doing, it critically reimagines our spatial politics and reconfigures our intellectual infrastructure. It is an exercise in historical recentering designed to instill Afghan humanity and agency onto the map of Afghanistan.

Some Medieval and Post-Golden Horde’s Towns of the Itil (Volga) and Syr-Darya Basins According to the Arabic and Chinese Maps

Research objectives: The earliest depictions of the towns of the Itil (Volga) and Syr-Darya Basins in medieval cartography are found on the Idrisi map (1154). The post-Golden Horde towns in these areas are found in the Jenkinson map and the Kunyu wanguo quan tu (Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the Earth, 1602) by Matteo Ricci. In 1772, the Qianlong neifu yutu 乾隆内府舆圖 (Terrestrial Map of the Imperial Repository of Qianlong), which used modern cartographic techniques, enriched the geographic information of Central Asian countries and filled the gaps in contemporary European maps. Research materials: Influenced by the map of Al-Idrīsī’, the geographic gaps and blind spots on the European maps were filled, reconstructed, and connected with the new world geographic knowledge, forming a relatively complete world map. At the end of the Ming and early Qing dynasties, a large amount of overseas geographic knowledge was introduced by Western missionaries who entered China. Results and novelty of the research: The analysis of Arab, European, and Chinese maps made it possible to assess the degree of accuracy of their information about the post-Golden Horde cities of the Itil (Volga) and Syr-Darya basins. The authors managed to determine the geographical ideas of Arab, European, and Chinese geographers about Central Asia. Specifically, this article examined the place names of the Itil Basin (including Western Siberia) and the Qazaq Steppe (including adjacent regions) in the European-Russian imperial maps and in the Qing Chinese maps. Historical maps provide rich resources of knowledge that graphically encode information about the state of a fraction of the real world at a certain point in time.

Poe's "Vast Island-Studded Ocean"

ABSTRACT: This article surveys Edgar Allan Poe's transpacific writings in the 1830s and analyzes competing conceptualizations of islands in and between his literary reviews, "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833), and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Whereas his reviews find him promoting a national expedition to the Pacific and supporting the associated expansion of US commercial and imperial interests, Poe's fiction offers coded warnings about the dangers of Western imperialism. In "MS." and Pym , Poe discredits imperial maps and seeks to transcend imperial frameworks by illustrating archipelagic resistance . The new readings identify sources from Pacific accounts that Poe had read or reviewed. "MS." provides a nightmarish allegory in which a racialized hurricane—a virtual, deterritorialized Malay Archipelago—dashes the prospects of its Euro-American traders. In Pym , Poe uses geographical misdirection to turn Tsalal into a Pacific island unlike the romantic fantasies in the popular imaginary. In this dangerous contact zone that regenerates the disastrous consequences from previous transpacific voyages, Tsalalians use anti-imperial strategies employed by Oceanians in other antebellum narratives. The conclusion considers how Poe gestures to a "black Pacific" in "MS." and Pym , which is inspired by reactionary racial views but emerges in opposition to Euro-American imperial fantasies.

The Wandering Orthodox Nuns: Religion and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Central Balkans

This article discusses a specific type of religious travel—not pious pilgrimage to the Holy Lands—but more mundane trips performed by Eastern Orthodox sisters to beg for donations within and between three multi-confessional empires. More specifically, it focuses on how nuns’ spatial movements put them on the bigger imperial and transnational maps of church, state, and society and contributed to negotiating space for gender. By combining mobility and gender as categories of analysis, I position the sisters’ acts within three broad themes: travel, women's education, and social networks. I suggest that nuns’ involvement in local communities and the establishment of schools for girls provides evidence for worldly as well as pious concerns. By encompassing rich social interactions, the sisters’ story presents gender imbalances in more palpable form and embodies larger experiences of nineteenth-century women who strove to achieve self-development and to assert social visibility.

Imperial Maps of Xinjiang and Their Readers in Qing China, 1660–1860

AbstractThis article explores information management in the Qing government, and the challenges confronted by the Qing authorities, through the prism of imperial maps of Xinjiang. To ensure that newly gathered geographical knowledge of Xinjiang was usable for the emperor and senior officials, technocrats and artisans in the Imperial Household Department collaborated with the Jesuits and border officials to produce maps that materialized it. Because of their utility in military campaigns and everyday governance, these maps were carefully maintained by the Imperial Household Department, which discreetly distributed them to a small coterie of Manchu and Mongol statesmen. Nevertheless, information leakage from the lower echelons of the bureaucracy challenged the department's monopoly and popularized knowledge of Xinjiang among the Han literati.

Maps, Mission, Memory and Mizo Identity

This article will examine the role of imperial maps, Christian mission, shared memories and collective consciousness in the formation of Mizo identity. Arguing that imperial maps, supposedly based upon objective European science, were meant to suit specific purposes and were laden with deeper agendas, this article will maintain that other aspiring maps also depicted conflicting claims to territory and overlooked specific details rather than giving factual descriptions. This article will look at how borders and boundaries thus constructed have actual impacts upon the people, places and spaces they divide and include. It will particularly deal with the aspirations of the Mizo Christians who embraced Christianity during the colonial period, and how they are ‘in India’ but often feel ‘not of India’, and will interrogate the Biblical and historical dimensions of their mental maps.

Anglican Confirmation, 1662–1820 by Phillip Tovey

Reviewed by: Anglican Confirmation, 1662–1820 by Phillip Tovey Martha F. Bowden Phillip Tovey. Anglican Confirmation, 1662–1820. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. xii [H11001] 201. $149.95. Mr. Tovey emphasizes the historical context of Anglican confirmation in the eighteenth century, spreading a net wide enough to include not just British parish churches, but the wider imperial map, including the North American colonies and the Indian subcontinent. The intention is to subvert misperceptions caused by viewing the eighteenth-century church through "Victorian lenses." His review of the twentieth-century scholarship that began to dismantle Victorian ecclesiastical historiography is useful, but omits a number of revisionist historians such as Jeremy Gregory, B. W. Young, and Peter B. Nockells. Some of them are drawn into the later discussion, but the groundbreaking collection, The Church of England c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (1993), edited by J. Walsh, C. Haydon, and S. Taylor, does not appear. The Victorian two-step theory of initiation, forgiveness (baptism) followed by reception of the Spirit (confirmation), which became the accepted orthodoxy, was not part of most eighteenth-century theologians' view of the rite, nor was confirmation universally considered a sacrament. Mr. Tovey's very thorough research is a useful [End Page 84] reminder that the church in this period was not the sleepy, complacent organization that is also the legacy of Victorian history-making. He demonstrates a church engaged in concerned scrutiny of the meaning and proper procedures for confirmation, the place of catechizing, and the qualifications of candidates, revealing the very different theologies of baptism that ground the arguments. Samuel Clarke believed that confirmation was required to provide full membership in the church, when confirmands entered into the covenant introduced in baptism; Thomas Bray did not believe in "automatic baptismal regeneration." Richard Baxter's famous description of the chaos attending his confirmation, long considered normative, appears to be an exception. Thus it is unfortunate that the frontispiece, showing a bishop laying hands on a group of young men kneeling at a communion rail, dates from 1885. It may indicate the paucity of images of church practices in the earlier period, but it is solidly Victorian. The chapters cover theology, liturgy, sermons, practice, case studies of five dioceses, and the Anglican communion in North America. Because confirmation was eliminated in 1645 with the abolition of the Book of Common Prayer and not reinstated officially until the Restoration there were many congregants in 1660 who had never been confirmed. Mr. Tovey disputesS. L. Ollard's claim, however, that the vast numbers of candidates at eighteenth-century confirmation services, sometimes more than 3,000, indicated a need to "catch up." He points out that in that case, the numbers would diminish as the century progresses, but they do not. He also refutes Ollard's contention that catechizing was neglected in the period. The variety of catechetical materials and descriptions of practice in visitation returns demonstrate that Laurence Sterne, whom Mr. Tovey does not mention, and whom Ollard points to as exceptional for instructing youth at the parsonage rather than catechizing them briefly at Evensong, was in fact in line with many of his contemporaries. The chapter on sermons illustrates changing practice in the period. As he indicates, the confirmation rite calls for neither readings from scripture nor a sermon, but there is some evidence that the service normally included both; the sermons are easier to establish, because there are so many in print. Here again, the history of the practice is illuminating, because earlier in the period, the sermon was normally preached, not by the bishop, but by another clergyman. By the end of the century, though, it was normative for the bishop to preach, supporting the argument that confirmation was increasingly accepted as an episcopal act as the century went on. Here, however, the dates of publication can be misleading. Thomas Secker's sermon published in 1790 is used as evidence of increasing episcopal involvement late in the period, but this publication must be a reprint since Secker died in 1768. It is less easy to establish what the lectionary might have been; later versions of the Book of Common Prayer have passages from...

The medieval Peutinger map: imperial Roman revival in a German empire

1. Introduction 2. Roman roads and Roman perceptions of space 3. The battle of the maps 4. Christian maps and the Peutinger Map 5. German emperors, crusades, and an imperial map 6. Images and the medieval map 7. Conclusion.

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo–Indian Trade, 1732–1795 by Robert Paulett (review)

An Empire of Small Places: Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732-1795. By Robert Paulett. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. 264. Paper, $24.95.)Reviewed by Jon ParmenterRobert Paulett's new volume in the Early American Places series (a collaborative publishing endeavor undertaken by four university presses) makes an important intervention in the growing body of literature tracing transitions in eastern North American Native-settler relations from the colonial era to the early national period. Taking the southeastern deerskin trade as his framework, Paulett analyzes change over time in the spatial sensibilities that governed human relations in that region. Anglo American colonists initially adapted to indigenous concepts of in order to gain access to the deerskin trade. After 1763, British colonial authorities, and later those of the state of Georgia and the United States, found ways to impose their vision of a proper spatial order on the land. Linking ideological changes with physical transformations of the landscape, Paulett's study captures the rich spatial experience of a diverse range of historical actors in what is now the southeastern United States during a crucial period of its history.The book consists of six chapters, organized thematically but progressing in chronological order. Vividly written narrative vignettes open each chapter and prime the reader for the broader interpretive claims offered within. Paulett attends effectively to the intellectual challenge of reconstructing the Indian sense of space (4) while also assessing critically the transformative power of settler spatiality. While the study tracks the evolution of the deerskin trade from its origins in a Nativedominated, messy, and difficult-to-control empire of commerce, through British imperial efforts to better regulate an empire of land, down to a republican American empire of liberty devoted to the exclusion of Native people from their ancestral homelands, Paulett avoids falling into a narrative of inevitable indigenous decline. The author's focus on the originally shared and eventually contested production of in the southeast demonstrates how thousands of discrete human movements shaped the region's history before, during, and after the fundamentally transformative Revolutionary War.Paulett's opening chapter on the mapping of colonial Georgia-a colony founded to serve the interests of British imperial (12), intersects with cutting-edge work on imperialist cartography by demonstrating how colonial projectors' fantasies of controlling gridded Cartesian spaces confronted the competing discourse of indigenous peoples' relational, processual notions of as a series of interconnected points. The author's arguments are sustained by the sources cited, but unfortunately the reproductions of the maps in the text are small and lack the resolution to make an independently convincing visual case. Nevertheless, Paulett paints an effective picture of how sweeping claims to territorial mastery conveyed by early British imperial maps contrasted with colonial traders' actual experience of space; far from reflecting mastery over the landscape, the constricted movements of traders along Native paths generated traders' deep familiarity with only a limited number of places and peoples. Still, the jealousy with which traders guarded their particular, experiential geographical knowledge of the southeast became a flash point of controversy with imperial authorities seeking to rationalize control of revenues from the deerskin trade after 1763, as well as with colonial backcountry planters interested in replacing the town-based commercial economy of the deerskin trade with more intensive cultivation of agricultural commodities by an enslaved African labor force. …

Towards a “radical acceptance of vulnerability”: Postcolonialism and Deconstruction

Towards a “radical acceptance of vulnerability”:Postcolonialism and Deconstruction Simone Drichel (bio) The possibility for the home to open to the Other is as essential to the essence of the home as closed doors and windows. —Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity The “virus of deconstruction” Reflecting on Jacques Derrida’s lasting influence on a range of intellectual, cultural, social, and political practices, Derek Attridge opens his 2005 essay “Deconstruction Today” with a most intriguing hypothetical scenario, asking, What would a map of deconstruction today look like? If deconstruction is, as both its enemies and its friends have claimed, a kind of virus, and we might be able to produce—on the model of the mappings you might see in a treatise on global diseases—a large chart of the intellectual world with its presence marked in red, how would the result appear? (42) Spinning this hypothetical scenario further by, as he says, adding “another colour, say blue, to signal the presence of an antibody fiercely resisting the virus of deconstruction,” Attridge suggests that the map of deconstruction has changed dramatically over the last thirty years. Where an early map would have displayed intense spots of red and blue, spots that were limited to the disciplinary domains of philosophy and literature and the geographical space of France and the United States, “today,” he says, “the map would look very different”: Rather than red dots we would have to paint large areas of many countries and many disciplines in varying shades of pink, to show how widely deconstruction has permeated intellectual and creative activity even when no direct acknowledgement is made. Superimposed on the pink would be the red dots indicating the large number of teachers and scholars around the globe whose work is influenced directly by deconstruction; these would be more numerous, if perhaps more scattered, than in 1975. There would be fewer blue areas, though many would still be as intense. (44) In other words, thirty-odd years after its very localized emergence in France and the United States, the “virus of deconstruction” has spread [End Page 46] to and infiltrated every corner of the globe, leaving only isolated pockets of resistance to its global conquest. Why open this essay—which seeks to address the question of vulnerability via the vexed relationship between deconstruction and postcolonial studies—with what even Attridge himself acknowledges to be a “rather contrived metaphor” (44)? The answer is simple: contrived though it may be, Attridge’s metaphor of a map of the world being colored in with more and more red dots is intensely evocative in the context of postcolonial studies, where it cannot but conjure up a familiar image of imperialist take-over of the world through British rule. Just as the red dots of deconstruction have, according to Attridge, now spread virus-like beyond its original confines, so British rule once dotted the imperial map well beyond the geographical borders of “Mother England.” Somewhat surprisingly, Attridge himself does not draw this all-too-obvious parallel between what is ultimately a highly imperialist metaphor and an actual imperial history. Although he focuses on the field of postcolonial studies—as one of the areas “in which deconstruction […] made a formative contribution” (49)—he is not at all self-reflexive about the use of an imperialist metaphor in this context. Even as he proceeds to sketch the “Derridean influence on postcolonial studies” (48), he appears to be oblivious to the fact that, in doing so, he is implicitly associating not just deconstruction but also, by implication, the deconstructive strand of postcolonial studies with imperialist practices. A deconstructive postcolonialism, by involuntary association, here becomes an ideologically complicit extension of imperialism. Had Attridge been aware of this implied complicity, he might have had rather more to say about the postcolonial “blue dots”—the antibodies—that resist “the virus of deconstruction.” Granted, he does acknowledge that “[r]unning counter to the Derridean influence on postcolonial studies is a strong current of resistance by those who feel that the pursuit of ‘theory’ has been to the detriment of material analysis and actual achievements on the ground” (48); however, after a brief paragraph in which he juxtaposes “materialist” critic Benita Parry...

Afterword: On Mapping and Maps

Maps can lie, wield power and even start wars. But mapping, which describes the process of selecting and plotting information spatially, suggests a way of looking beyond the finished artefact, thereby eluding the charges leveled against the map. In recent discourse, mapping emerges from the ashes of the imperial map in a blaze of hopeful rhetoric: it is participatory, generative, revealing, enabling, performative. This paper will examine the historical and political baggage of the map and the potentials of mapping as an emerging concept. Building on the expansive discourse on maps and mapping in cartography, geography and history, I will focus this discussion on mapping as it has been interpreted in contemporary design, art, planning and education, drawing from some of my own experiences using mapping as a pedagogical tool in design education.

The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (review)

Reviewed by: The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire Lucy Chester The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire. Edited by James R. Akerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 384 pp. $60.00 (cloth). This valuable edited collection of essays originally presented at the University of Chicago's Newberry Library in 2004 examines the relationship between cartography and imperialism in a range of contexts, from military mapping to journalistic cartography and from the South Pacific to the Qing Empire. Three chapters cover the early modern era, while two essays deal with modern cartography; Matthew Edney's opening chapter, "The Irony of Imperial Mapping," ranges over both time periods. The authors have taken care to identify points of intersection between their essays, which cohere well. The book is lavishly illustrated with high-quality images in both color and black and white, as is necessary for a work on cartographic history. In terms of geographical range, the book covers Africa, China, Eurasia, North and South America, and the South Pacific. However, with the exception of Laura Hostetler's article, "Contending Cartographic Claims? The Qing Empire in Manchu, Chinese, and European Maps," the collection deals primarily with Western imperialism in these regions, which may leave teachers and scholars of world history wishing for a broader scope. [End Page 168] James Akerman's clear introduction provides useful context, both historical and historiographical. The contributions are all engaging and thought-provoking, with enough background to orient readers new to the material and enough substance and innovation to intrigue experts in the field. Each chapter summarizes its relationship to the existing literature, explaining how it draws from the work of cartographic historians such as Brian Harley, David Woodward, and Thongchai Winichakul, from imperial historiography, and from relevant subfields. A particular strength of these essays is their willingness to confront nuance and ambiguity. Edney's chapter, for example, deals forthrightly with the problem of defining empire and the "imperial map," arguing that states and empires practice similar kinds of cartography. The difference, he maintains, lies in audiences' emotional reaction to imperial maps, which generate both a sense of community among their readers and a feeling of distance and antagonism between those readers and the territory and its inhabitants. Valerie Kivelson's essay, "'Exalted and Glorified to the Ends of the Earth': Imperial Maps and Christian Spaces in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Russian Siberia," follows nicely upon these observations, for it examines the relationship between imperial map readers and the indigenous peoples of Siberia, arguing that the Russian empire's maps celebrated religious diversity (while, to be sure, subjugating and exploiting these "lesser faiths") rather than seeking to suppress it. As Kivelson notes, this approach stands in marked contrast to the methods of other European empires, such as the Spanish effort to convert the peoples of the New World. In addition to intriguing substantive content, each chapter engages vigorously with the relevant historiography. Hostetler's essay is particularly stimulating, asserting that Manchu, Chinese, and European maps of the Qing empire all worked, in different ways, to reify Qing territorial claims. Maps based on indigenous methods established the Qing dynasty as patrons of traditional Chinese scholarship, while European maps lent credibility to Qing claims on the international level. The combination worked so powerfully that it continues to affect present-day perceptions of China. Hostetler goes further, challenging conventional divisions between "Western" and "Eastern" mapping and arguing convincingly that scholars must also consider the existence and impact of hybrid cartographic forms drawing on multiple traditions. Similarly, Neil Safier's chapter, "The Confines of the Colony: Boundaries, Ethnographic Landscape, and Imperial Cartography in Iberoamerica," adds valuable nuance to Harley's famous discussion of "cartographic silences." Safier argues that, although Harley presented the absence of Amerindian populations from North American maps as tantamount to [End Page 169] eliminating those communities, the "cartographic evacuation" visible on Portuguese maps was part of a process wherein demographic information was reincorporated into other imperial records, such as population maps (p. 156). In other words, the Portuguese imperial archive reabsorbed those whom it had displaced cartographically, via other media that served its purposes more effectively. Safier concludes that mapping and other emerging...

The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire. Edited by James Akerman (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009) 384 pp. $60.00

<i>The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire.</i> Edited by James Akerman (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2009) 384 pp. $60.00

In Search of The Imperial Map: Walter Crane and the Image of Empire

In Search of The Imperial Map: Walter Crane and the Image of Empire

Национализм и конструирование карт “исторических территорий”: Обучение национальным историям в странах Южного Кавказа

SUMMARY: The article by Sergei Rumiantsev explores the relationship between contemporary political conflicts and the production and reproduction of maps of the ideal national homeland in public discourse and history textbooks in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. He argues that the map of ideal national homeland is an important symbolic instrument for inculcating a sense of nationhood in the post-Soviet South Caucasus. The analyzed maps are invariably based on a primordial understanding of nationality that serves to collate relevant pieces of historical geography. These maps are used by politicians and official experts to legitimize present-day conflicts and contest present-day political boundaries. The author then traces the historical evolution of the territorial sense of nationhood from the moment of the rise of modern national movements in the South Caucasus, and demonstrates how the modern national imagination and imperial map- and boundary-making exercise laid the groundwork for contemporary iconic images of the territorial nationhood of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and their respective ideal national homelands.

Imperial Cartography and Victorian Literature: Charting the Wishes and Anguish of an Island-Empire

This essay is inspired by Benedict Anderson's theorisation that communities are products of collective imagination. Literature and cartography, as Anderson points out, exert considerable influence in marking the imaginary contour of a specific community. To Anderson's theorisation, this essay will add a few notes, suggesting that literary mapping and cartographic writing convey dialectic messages and thereby chart contending communities. Through an examination of Victorian adventure stories (The Coral Island, King Solomon's Mines and Kim), domestic novels (Wuthering Heights, The Way We Live Now and The Sign of Four), an imperial map and a fictional treasure map, this essay will unfold the ideological underpinnings of writing and charting, analyse the rhetoric of wish and anguish in both acts, and interrogate Britain's conflicting doctrines of global imperialism and insular nationalism. The ultimate aim is to argue that literary mapping, analogous to cartographic writing, captures a Britain that is at once an invincible empire flexing its muscle worldwide and a vulnerable island besieged by the Atlantic Ocean, Irish Sea, English Channel, and North Sea. Between Britain's wishes and anguish, Victorian writers sketch in their contemporaries' imagination a contour of the British Empire in which the centre itself is decentred.

‘The veiled protectorate of Kowait’: liberalized imperialism and British efforts to influence Kuwaiti domestic policy during the reign of Sheikh Ahmad al‐Jaber, 1938–50

British foreign policy-makers confronted a difficult quandary when in the late 1930s exportable quantities of oil were discovered in Kuwait. The discovery transformed Kuwait from an obscure corner of the British imperial map significant only for securing the route to India to an important, if not critical, strategic and economic asset. Grasping Kuwait's new-found importance, British strategists quickly realized that they could take full advantage of Kuwait's oil resources only if they were able to exert influence over Kuwait's domestic policies. The structure of Britain's treaties with Kuwait, however, denied such a prospect. In 1899, when the Government of India negotiated the first treaty governing Britain's relationship with Kuwait, Kuwait's only value was its strategic location along the sea lanes to India. Britain consequently had negotiated control only of Kuwait's foreign relations, and had solemnly pledged not to interfere in matters of domestic concern. But as British strategists now discovered, such an arrangement was satisfactory only so long as Kuwait remained a quiet port concerned with pearl diving and localized trade; with oil revenue now flooding Kuwaiti coffers, allowing the Kuwaitis to manage their internal affairs without British guidance was no longer acceptable. The Kuwaitis, however, were hardly prepared to relinquish their right to unimpeded self-government. Thus, British interests and politico-legal realities confronted head on. As a result, the British were compelled to try to reconfigure their relationship with Kuwait in such a way that would give them influence over Kuwaiti affairs yet would violate neither their treaty obligations nor emerging liberal international norms. Over the ensuing decade, two strategies were devised: first, promotion of limited liberalization and democratization; and second, when that failed to yield acceptable results, attempts to persuade Kuwait to

IMPERIAL CHINTZ: DOMESTICITY AND EMPIRE

IN OCTOBER 1856, the wife of the Governor General of India noted her satisfaction with recent changes at Government House in Calcutta: “I believe it would look rather nice even as an English country-house, so marvelously is it improved by 450 yards of rose-chintz, a great many arm-chairs, small round tables, drawings etc., and flowerpots in number” (Allen 34). Having arrived in Calcutta in February of that year, Lady Charlotte Canning wasted no time in transporting Victorian upper-class domestic style to a key spot on Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial map. As several recent examinations of the role of Victorian women in the work of empire have shown us, although Lady Canning’s lavish transformation of colonized space into something resembling a Derbyshire drawing-room could not be matched by lower-ranked Englishwomen who accompanied their military and civilian husbands to outposts of empire — 450 yards is a lot of chintz and the Queen had personally despatched some Royal family portraits to Calcutta to assist Lady Canning in her interior decoration — they too did their English domesticating bit. Among other things, these women grew pansies in Simla, served afternoon tea in Ceylon, and arranged croquet parties in Jamaica. They were also faced with less pleasant tasks, as one learns from the memoirs of Harriet Tytler, who accompanied her husband on various military postings in India during the 1840s and 50s. Tytler buried several children, dead of non-treatable illnesses, endured the killing climate of Dacca, and survived the siege of Delhi in 1857.