Imperial Role Research Articles

Imperialism after decolonization? British relations with Bahrain from the withdrawal East of Suez to the Iranian Revolution

There is a growing consensus that the end of empire did not necessarily equate with a severing of imperial ties. Some historians have even argued that there was a shift from formal to informal empire in Britain’s relations with the emerging Gulf States. This is especially so with respect to Bahrain which had represented the epicentre of Britain’s position in the Gulf. Nevertheless, an analysis of British relations with Bahrain from the withdrawal East of Suez to the Iranian Revolution belies any notion that Britain succeeded in establishing an informal imperial position after 1971. Not only were Britain’s economic interests in Bahrain eroded by growing competition from its industrial rivals, but also its political and military position was challenged by the encroachment of regional powers. Any hope that Britain could retain an imperial role in Bahrain was undermined still further by the emergence of new internal political forces in Bahrain beyond the direct control of either the ruling family or Britain itself. The unfeasibility of maintaining an imperial relationship with Bahrain after 1971 persuaded British policymakers to seek to establish recognizably post-imperial relations with the Emirate in the decade following the withdrawal from East of Suez.

The Council on Foreign Relations, the Israel Lobby, and the War on Gaza

As dangerous trans-Atlantic crossings between Africa and Europe continue to rise, Hannah Cross examines the roots of the ongoing crisis. The discussion around migration, she notes, "overlooks the imperial role of Europe and the United States over borders, migration regimes, regional (de-)integration, and national development projects within Africa." The solution, therefore, can only be found through genuine liberation and autonomy across the continent, rather than internationally imposed mechanisms benefitting the powerful in the Global North.

Return of the Atlantic Route from West Africa to Europe

As dangerous trans-Atlantic crossings between Africa and Europe continue to rise, Hannah Cross examines the roots of the ongoing crisis. The discussion around migration, she notes, "overlooks the imperial role of Europe and the United States over borders, migration regimes, regional (de-)integration, and national development projects within Africa." The solution, therefore, can only be found through genuine liberation and autonomy across the continent, rather than internationally imposed mechanisms benefitting the powerful in the Global North.

Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India, by Nilanjana Mukherjee

Reviewed by: Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India by Nilanjana Mukherjee Ushashi Dasgupta (bio) Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India, by Nilanjana Mukherjee; pp. xiii + 300. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021, $136.00, $39.16 ebook, £120.00, £31.44 ebook. At the turn of the nineteenth century, William Lambton embarked upon a trigonometrical survey of India’s southern peninsula. As Nilanjana Mukherjee explains, this highly technical method of mapping required “ready access to vantage points, such as mountain or hill tops, or temples and fort steeples” (85). The project was met with bemusement in the colonial administration. “If any traveller wished to proceed to Seringapatam,” the Finance Committee of Madras declared, “[they] need only say to head palankeen bearer, and . . . he would find his way to that place without having recourse to Col. Lambton’s map” (83). On the ground, resistance was evident. Poligars reacted with anger when an officer arrived to set up a triangulation station at Narnicul Droog in 1803. In Mysore, Joshua De Penning cut down a sacred peepul tree “in order to clear and create the view.” Lambton himself “failed to realise why his survey faced such obstacles and blamed it partly on British administrative inefficiency and failure to communicate with the natives” (87). “Even in the bigotted country of Tanjore,” he wrote, “I ascended no less than 12 Coverams [gopuram], and without those lofty buildings I never could have got through the country” (88). Taken together, Mukherjee’s examples raise questions about different kinds of geographical knowledge—that of the map-maker, standing on high, versus [End Page 713] the palankeen-bearer, carrying the weight of the colonizer’s body. They also establish connections among cartography, power, and violence. For Mukherjee, “the specular method of the survey completely overwrote as well as overrode the lived space which already existed in the experiential reality of the natives” (85). This captures Mukherjee’s argument in miniature. Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India identifies the ways in which “the British made themselves the intellectual masters of the Indian landscape”; cartographic projects were about the desire for, and assertion of, control (13). For Mukherjee, increasingly organized attempts to subject Britain, especially “the Celtic and Gaelic fringes,” to the “gaze” had direct consequences in the empire (118): British surveyors, artists, and travel writers were determined to pin India down in much the same way. Thus, India—as concept, discernible territory, imperial possession— became crystallized. Each section of the book begins with a chapter on trends in Britain before moving into Indian case studies in the second chapter. The first section introduces British geodetic, hydrographic, and cartographic initiatives, such as the Ordnance Survey. The India chapter considers Lambton and James Rennell, whose Bengal Atlas (1781) and Map of Hindoostan (1782) saw “the figure of the cartographer [become] an imperial role model and a vanguard” (73). The second section argues that artists had a “distinctive way of ‘seeing’ Indian landscape, and thereby of possessing it and shaping it” (127). It explores aesthetic responses to nature and architecture in Britain, the depiction of exotic locales in stage scenery, and the popularity of panoramas representing India. It then shifts its focus to Company art, which places the “native subject within an imperial aesthetic frame”: the picturesque (147). Though the chapter discusses painters’ views of Kolkata, its central figures are George Chinnery and Charles D’Oyly, whose eyes were drawn to Dhaka. D’Oyly’s Sketches of the New Road (1830) “celebrate[s] . . . colonial circulation and public work” (166). The final section asks “how literature (especially of travel) is used . . . to control, order or limn a place” (189). The India chapter examines William Hodges’s Travels in India (1790), James Baillie Fraser’s Journal of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains, and to the Sources of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges (1820), Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India (1828) by Reginald Heber, the Bishop of Calcutta, and botanical studies by Joseph Dalton Hooker...

Armies of Arabia: Military Politics and Effectiveness in the Gulf

Armies of Arabia: Military Politics and Effectiveness in the Gulf

Aesthetics of Law as ‘Iconic Legal Theology’: Legendre, Schmitt and Vico

The article locates the aesthetics of law within modern legal knowledge, moving from the analysis of Kelsen’s and Schmitt’s theories. Schmitt’s reading of Hobbes becomes the starting point in which political theology can be understood as an iconic legal theology, since the image of Leviathan. Legendre expands the reconstruction of the legal aesthetic model to the entire second millennium, moving from the appropriation of the imperial role of the Roman Pontiff. The article reads the frontispiece of Vico’s Scienza Nuova as a possible alternative to the Hobbesian model and as the foundation of contemporary visual legal studies.

Functional interplay between antagonistic bacteria and Rhizoctonia solani in the tomato plant rhizosphere.

Microbial interactions with plant roots play an imperial role in tomato plant growth and defense against the Rhizoctonia solani. This study performed a field experiment with two antagonistic bacteria (Pseudomonas and Bacillus) inoculated in healthy and Rhizoctonia solani treated soil in tomato rhizosphere to understand the metabolic pattern and microbial function during plant disease suppression. In the present study, we assessed soil and microbial enzymes, bacterial and fungal cell forming unit (CFU), and carbon utilization profiling through Bio-Eco plates of rhizoplane samples. Antagonist bacteria and pathogen interaction significantly (p < 0.05) influenced the bacterial count, soil enzymes (chitinase and glucanase), and bacterial function (siderophore and chitinase production). These results indicated that these variables had an imperial role in disease suppression during plant development. Furthermore, the metabolic profiling showed that carbon source utilization enhanced under fruit development and ripening stages. These results suggested that carbon sources were essential in plant/pathogen/antagonist interaction. Substrates like β-methyl-D-glucoside, D-mannitol, D-galacturonic acid, N-acetyl-D-glucosamine, and phenylethylamine strongly connect with the suppuration of root rot disease. These carbon sources may help to propagate a healthy microbial community to reduce the pathogen invasion in the plant root system, and these carbon sources can be stimulators of antagonists against pathogens in the future.

The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte

Reviewed by: The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte Michael Kenneth Huner Keywords Javier Uriarte, Michael Kenneth Huner, State Formation, Nineteenth Century, Postcolonial, Latin America uriarte, javier. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. Routledge, 2020, xvi + 306 pp. Literary scholar Javier Uriarte supplies in The Desertmakers incisive reflection about late-nineteenth-century state formation in Latin America. The work achieves distinction as a valuable study for experts in this field and would serve as a fine addition, with interdisciplinary appeal, to a graduate course on the subject. The book does not lend itself for use in a typical undergraduate classroom. Its dense thirty-page introduction struggles to articulate concisely the work's contributions. It requires wading into the rich analysis of the essays that follow to discover them. Four extended essays on the writings of an intriguing collection of authors comprise the heart of the book. It is indeed a curious compilation at first glance: the famous British adventurer Richard Burton, the Argentine-born English novelist W. H. Hudson, the Argentine scientific explorer Francisco Moreno, and the singular Brazilian literary chronicler Euclides Da Cunha. Two subjects of the British empire grouped alongside two citizens of then-recently created or consolidated South American republics would seem to invite a mere review of contrasting cultural perspectives and styles, not a study of a coherent literary community. But these authors often read and referenced each other, or had other literary and political acquaintances in common—like Domingo Sarmiento and Teddy Roosevelt—as Uriarte documents. They shared the elite worldview of the burgeoning neocolonial age in the region, either as traveling representatives of an informal British reach in South America or as traveling agents of the liberal-republican states in Brazil and Argentina. And, as Uriarte also demonstrates, they all arrived at a common disillusionment with the promised results of liberal progress and state-making realized via war, especially those conflicts that waged campaigns of apparent extermination. The diverse range of conflicts involved is noteworthy here: interstate war, civil war, Indian wars, and a counterinsurgent campaign are the focus of the [End Page 319] writings examined. It is an apt variety consistent with the historical experience of postcolonial Latin American states; interstate wars were the least common form of conflict in the region. Uriarte then appropriately links the specific conflicts discussed in a causal chain and considers the massive, interstate Triple Alliance (or Paraguayan) War (1864–1870) generative of the others. He collectively reads the accounts of the conflicts "as journeys through remains, through ruins" (268). The common thesis is that these writers recount how, as modern capitalist-backed forces attempted to extend state authority over previously unconquered "deserts," the wars to do so—and the accounts of those wars—reproduced desertlike ruins in turn. The thesis is perhaps most strained, however, in the first essay about Richard Burton and his understudied travelogue Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay. Uriarte does make a crucial contribution to the study of Burton's travel writings; nearly all previous studies ignored his travels through South America and his letters about the war in Paraguay. And, indeed, Uriarte's integrative analysis of Letters is quite strong. He highlights how Burton's travels with the allied armies into Paraguay remained well behind the progress of the actual front and so what he encountered were battlefield ruins and secondhand stories about their developments. The result is Burton's sympathetic portrayal of Paraguayans as heroic premodern savages and his critique of the destructiveness of the allies' war, even as he considers the Paraguayans doomed by the inevitable momentum of history. The problems arise when Uriarte wanders into other historical questions. He attempts to resurrect the interpretation of Great Britain's imperial role in the conflict—an interpretation that now definitively persists in a zombielike state no matter how many times historians kill it. It feeds Uriarte's insistence that Paraguay was the victim of allied aggression that finished the country's "sui generis process of modernization" (62). This depiction ignores the findings of a generation of recent historical scholarship on nineteenth-century Paraguayan state formation—including works that Uriarte cites—that...

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950

Empires of Antiquities: Modernity and the Rediscovery of the Ancient Near East, 1914–1950

Heresy and polemic: reassessing the fifth-century ecclesiastical historians of Late Antiquity

ABSTRACT: Scholars have tended to emphasize distinctions within late antique historiography, breaking it up into categories of ecclesiastical/‘pagan’, orthodox/heretical, Greek/Latin, narrative/chronicle, and others. The division of ecclesiastical historians into orthodox/heretical has led to designating non-Nicene history writing as polemical. I hope to show that drawing a stark line between the ecclesiastical historians discounts the significant connections between them. Philostorgius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret serve as a good starting point for the reintegration of these historians into the literary culture of which they were a part. I examine these histories to demonstrate their commonalities while simultaneously showing their distinctiveness. Specifically, I focus on how these historians presented the imperial role in the destruction of religious property.

Eastern Mediterranean at the turn of the tide [Book review:] Fusaro M. Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. XVI+408 p.

The reviewed book by Professor Maria Fusaro (the University of Exeter, UK) is one of the key works in the modern historiography of the Eastern Mediterranean. The study consists of an introduction and twelve chapters based on the evaluation of a considerable number of sources, both primary and secondary (748 items), that create a multi-dimensional picture of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 16–17th centuries. The concept of the Venetian state as a “functional empire” developed in the study, along with an analysis of the British commercial expansion into the Mediterranean are placed into a wider context of the socio-economic transformation of the region. The author highlights the ignorance of the Republic’s subjects’ economic interest and preoccupation with the imperial role of Venice among the major factors that contributed to the failure to maintain its position in the Eastern Mediterranean. The success of the English was facilitated by the institutional peculiarities of their trade network, the crisis of the Venetian fleet, and the economic situation in the region. Among institutional peculiarities, the author stresses the freedom of action characteristic of the Levantine company, well-developed communal connections, the support of the state, and close partnership with Greek merchants. The multi-dimensional analysis of the early modern Eastern Mediterranean presented in the study allows us to both deepen our understanding of the region’s history and draw parallels between different colonial systems. The narrative formulated in the book considers not only European and Levantine contexts but also proto-global connections. The combination of these features makes the study under review a part of an essential bibliography for the scholars specializing in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Emperor at the Council. Imperial Interventions in Late Antique Church Councils in Literary Sources and Documentary Records

Abstract This paper examines the modes of imperial interactions with Church councils, focusing on the emperor’s participation in episcopal meetings and its representation in late antique sources, both literary and documentary. The author argues that the availability and strategic dissemination of conciliar records could affect, for better or worse, the understanding of the imperial religious policy and attitude towards Church institutions. This is most clearly illustrated by Marcian’s behaviour at Chalcedon, and by the active steps he took to produce an official and imperially endorsed edition of the conciliar acts. The significance of Marcian’s initiatives emerges more clearly when placed in the context of developing practices with respect to conciliar procedure (and the imperial role therein) and the circulation of conciliar information. After considering possible precedents in both these fields, the article reconstructs the early circulation and reception of the Chalcedonian acts, focusing particularly on the records of the sixth session, which was presided by the emperor himself. The author discusses the role played by the imperial initiative at the council and in its aftermath, and how it contributed to shape the reception of Marcian’s image as a Christian ruler.

Neuroprotective Effect of Fisetin Against the Cerebral Ischemia-Reperfusion Damage via Suppression of Oxidative Stress and Inflammatory Parameters.

It is well established that inflammatory reactions and oxidative stress play an imperial role in cerebral ischemia-reperfusion pathogenesis. Fisetin is a flavonoid and has an antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effect on various diseases. In this study, we have been working to examine the neuroprotective effect of fisetin in brain injuries triggered by cerebral ischemic-reperfusion and explore the potential role of nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) signaling. In vitro, fisetin was examined against the cell viability, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) leakage, cytokines, and apoptosis after ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) induced in the cells. In vivo, I/R injury was induced in the brain via transient middle cerebral artery occlusion (2 h) and reperfusion (20 h). The infarction area, brain water content, and neurofunctional parameters were also estimated. Inflammatory cytokines and brain injury markers were scrutinized at the end of the study. Fisetin treatment alleviated cell injury and suppressed the inflammatory cytokines (interleukin-1 (IL-1), tumor necrosis factor- α (TNF-α), inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), interleukin-1β (IL-1β), cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), interleukin-16 (IL-6), and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2)) and antioxidant parameters in a dose-dependent manner. Fisetin significantly (P < 0.001) reduced the infarct volume, brain water content. Fisetin significantly (P < 0.001) suppressed the neurological parameters and inflammatory cytokines such as IL-1, TNF-α, iNOS, IL-1β, COX-2, IL-6, PGE2, and oxidative markers in a dose-dependent manner. Fisetin significantly (P < 0.001) reduced the inflammatory mediators including NF-κB and intercellular adhesion molecule 1 (ICAM-1). Further studies also showed that fisetin significantly inhibited the NF-κB activity via inflammatory and antioxidant pathways. In conclusion, by suppressing inflammatory cytokines, fisetin protected the brain tissue against I/R injury, and this effect could be due to reduced NF-κB activity.

Arrowsmith Goes Native: Medicine and Empire in Fiction and Film

This essay examines how evolving perceptions of America's role as a world power in the interwar period affect representations of medical research and practice. It argues that Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith, and the film based on that novel, construct imperial role for the United States in their depictions of American scientific medicine. In recent years, scholars of American literature and culture have applied insights from the study of European colonial discourse to their analyses of American texts written during the heyday of empire. As Amy Kaplan notes in her introduction to the anthology Cultures of United States Imperialism, this investigation of the project of American empire seeks to correct the tendency to treat American expansionism as an entirely separate phenomenon from European colonization of the nineteenth century rather than interrelated form of imperial expansion (11). In a similar vein, historians of American medicine have begun to identify the influence of the racial ideologies of nineteenth-century European tropical medicine on American scientific medicine of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Works such as Warwick Anderson's Immunities of Empire have demonstrated that the transition from climatological to germ-based understandings of disease in American medicine did not change the imperial role played by medical researchers in tropical countries: in fact, new understandings of disease transmission resulted in calls for greater intervention into the lives of colonial subjects. Both these recent fields of postcolonial inquiry have begun to have effect on the study of the relationship between medicine and American literature, enabling new understandings of how American literature engages the vexed dynamic between medicine and empire. There has, however, been little examination of colonial rhetoric in perhaps the most well-known work of American literature focussed on medicine, Sinclair Lewis's 1925 novel, Arrowsmith. In what is clearly the most dramatic portion of the novel, Martin Arrowsmith journeys to the fictional West Indian island of St. Hubert to test the effectiveness of his newly developed plague vaccine. Martin succeeds in establishing a controlled experiment, but a series of events--including the death of Martin's wife from plague--lead him to sabotage his own work. By focussing on the collapse of Martin's greatest scientific project, the St. Hubert chapters of Arrowsmith call into question the novel's otherwise unflappable faith in scientific medicine, thus compromisi ng what medical historian Charles Rosenberg has described as the moral (47) of the novel. More than that, the ruined experiment seems specifically to represent the failure of Western reason in the tropics: there is a suggestion, in Arrowsmith, that Martin Arrowsmith goes at the end of his stay in St. Hubert. In this essay, which is a reading of Lewis's Arrowsmith as well as the 1931 film based on Lewis's novel, I argue that the West Indies episodes in both texts are best understood by examining how Arrowsmith positions itself in respect to contemporary debates about the international role of American scientific medicine. I begin by considering a paradox in the structure of the Lewis's St. Hubert chapters. The novel's description of St. Hubert--blighted by British colonial rule as well as by plague--establishes Martin, a scientist and American, as the hero the island desperately needs. However, Martin does not plan to save St. Hubert; rather, he wants to perfect a vaccine for future use. When Martin's experiment is performed on the black bodies of the island's native population, the novel is unable to contain the contradictions between narrative expectations and diagetic action: in a sense, the novel collapses at the same time as does Martin. After considering the implications of this collapse for the novel, I show how the film version of Arrowsmith replaces the tension between Martin's experiment and St. …

Imperial Adjudication in Late Antiquity: Evolutions and Perceptions in the Light of Documentary Evidence

This paper explores the functions of recorded proceedings in late antique court administration, focusing on documentary records related to imperial adjudication. Verbatim records of verdicts uttered by the emperor on individual cases are on the whole scarcely attested; they become particularly rare from the mid-3rd century AD, and are no longer preserved after the 4th century. The author scrutinizes the causes and meaning of such a state of evidence. After an in-depth analysis of the extracts of proceedings included in the Theodosian and Justinian codes, parallel literary and non-literary sources on imperial jurisdiction in the 4th and 5th centuries are considered. The discussion highlights changes occurred in the function, circulation and reception of minuted records. These reflect evolutions which affected not only judicial procedure, but also the understanding of the imperial role, the forms of institutional communication, and late antique legal thinking.

Security forces and the end of empire in the Trucial States, 1960–1971

One of the notable characteristics of Britain’s imperial role in the Trucial States (United Arab Emirates from 1971) was the establishment of armed forces and security services. The Trucial Oman Scouts (TOS) were the most important proto army in the sheikhdoms. During the last decade of the pax Britannica in the Trucial States competing units were also established in the region. The Foreign Office also sought to counter the potential threat of opposition groups inspired by several models of Arab nationalism by developing the internal security forces of the sheikhdoms. The establishment of these military organisations was attractive because they were much cheaper than deploying British forces. In January 1968 the Labour government decided to withdraw from East of Suez. The armies of the Trucial States formed the basis of the UAE armed forces, and British played a central role in creating the security state in the Emirates.

Cultural City Brands And Global Competitiveness

This article deals with the problem of a city's cultural identity, which allows us to develop a strong city brand and ensure its global competitiveness. The authors analyzed the basic conceptual approaches to identifying a city’s cultural identity. They concluded that the imperial and global level of the city influences the development of its cultural identity and contributes to the growth of its brand value. The authors analyzed the cultural identity of cities, which is essentially based on the imperial role and global prevalence of cultural imperatives. This work shows that cities may not be characterized by the imperial essence and global orientation from throughout their historical development. The imperial essence and global orientation of the city can develop for a certain period of the city’s history. However, when the cultural context changes and its influence in the cultural, economic and social space weakens, the city also loses its imperial or global status. The article also reveals new patterns in the formation of key attributes of a city brand and the development of its cultural identity. The identified patterns are applied in the evaluation of the global competitiveness of a city, within the framework of a breakthrough strategy implementation in the place market. In accordance with the proposed assessment system, a model of city competitiveness was developed and tested in four cities with strong brands and evident cultural identity. These cities also met the requirements for an imperial level of development, globalism, and a breakthrough positioning strategy. Implementation of this model also contributed to the development of new recommendations on the breakthrough positioning of city brands based on their cultural identity, including the imperial essence and globalism of the city.

The British End of the British Empire by Sarah Stockwell

Reviewed by: The British End of the British Empire by Sarah Stockwell Poppy Cullen The British End of the British Empire By Sarah Stockwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Studies of decolonization used to be limited to constitutional histories, ending when colonies became independent; more recently, the scope and chronology of such studies has become wider. Sarah Stockwell's The British End of the British Empire makes a significant contribution to this trend through her consideration of four British institutions in the decades around the end of empire: the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Bank of England, Royal Mint, and Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. How each of these institutions adapted to changing circumstances is meticulously detailed and situated in extensive historiography. Stockwell's research in the archives of each institution, often using material that other scholars have not accessed, particularly at the Royal Mint, allows her to paint a comprehensive picture of each of them. The focus is mostly, though not exclusively, on Anglophone Africa. Although the book is primarily aimed at scholars of decolonization, anyone concerned with the specific institutions will find plenty of interest here. The first chapter offers a history of the four institutions prior to decolonization, laying the groundwork for the rest of the book. It demonstrates the ways that empire intersected with the four institutions: Oxford and Cambridge trained colonial administrators, the Bank of England focused on the sterling area, the Royal Mint provided colonial coin, and Sandhurst trained soldiers for imperial postings. The second chapter offers particularly powerful analysis of technical assistance, a subject which often does not receive the attention it deserves. Stockwell shows the centrality of technical assistance to decolonization and the postcolonial era in Africa, arguing that it "should not be seen as constituting a distinct phase in postcolonial British-African relations but a constituent part of the decolonization process" (91). One of the central arguments of the book, as the title makes clear, is that this was a specifically British end of empire. While Stockwell's study of technical assistance is situated within a wider context, she argues throughout that these institutions sought to promote specifically British models. This was not just about convincing postcolonial states to remain in the Western sphere of influence. Instead, British institutions had "a common conviction in the value and relevance of British models, practice and expertise" (291). This was hard for newly independent states to discard. Although they could and often did look beyond Britain for assistance, they still needed "English-speaking experts familiar with British traditions" (121). Each of the four institutions receives its own, detailed chapter. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge had an imperial role of training colonial administrators, which shifted to one of training "locals," both before and after independence. Although it is "perhaps surprising" (137) that Oxbridge was able to continue in this role for so long, Stockwell shows the ability of institutions, and individuals within institutions, to use the opportunities offered by decolonization. She also points out that influence was not unidirectional, and that the universities' syllabi, particularly development studies, were influenced in turn by African decolonization. The Bank of England was initially reluctant to set up central banks in colonies, but once it became apparent that they could not prevent this, sought to shape the process. Here, Stockwell shows the Bank's particular commitment to the idea of the Commonwealth, and, for as long as was possible, the sterling area. The Royal Mint is distinct from the other institutions as its primary motives were commercial. Initially, it was remarkably successful as "decolonization saw the Mint's transformation from an 'imperial' to a 'global' institution" (194). Stockwell also offers an illuminating discussion of "the cultural politics of imperialism on display" (219) in the design of African coins. The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst is also distinct in that its postimperial role was not one it actively sought. Rather, it "became a tool of colonial, Commonwealth and foreign policy" (57) through training overseas cadets. There were tensions as the Academy was reluctant to have too many overseas students, and the experiences of overseas cadets were not always positive, some facing racism. The impact of all this on newly independent states...

Toward Transcultural Theory

Toward Transcultural Theory

The state of global capitalism today

AbstractWill the US sustain its imperial role in the wake of the fourth great crisis of capitalism?