Emigration from Scotland has always been very high. Some may assume that it peaked with the Highland clearances. However, emigration from Scotland between the wars surpassed all records; more people emigrated than were born, leading to an overall population decline. Why was it so many people left? Marjory Harper, whose knowledge is grounded in a deep understanding of the local records, maps out the many factors which worked together to cause this massive diaspora. After an opening section where the author sets the Scottish experience within the context of the rest of the British Isles, the...

This is a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China," challenging our understanding of British imperialism there. Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand...

Offering a fresh new perspective on the history of the end of Empire, with the Irish and Indian independence movements as its focus, this book details how each country's nationalist agitators engaged with each other and exchanged ideas.
Using previously unpublished sources from the Indian Political Intelligence collection, it chronicles the rise and fall of movements such as the Indian-Irish Independence League and the League Against Imperialism, whose histories have, until now, remained deeply hidden in the archives. O'Malley also highlights opaque aspects of the careers of popular...

In this book, Brenda M. King challenges the notion that Britain always exploited its empire. Creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship were all part of the Anglo-Indian silk trade and were nurtured in the era of empire through mutually beneficial collaboration. The trade operated within and without the empire, according to its own dictates and prospered in the face of increasing competition from China and Japan. King presents a new picture of the trade, where the strong links between Indian designs, the English silk industry and prominent members of the English the arts and crafts movement...

Colonial Policing and the Imperial Endgame is the first comprehensive study of the colonial police and their complex role within Britain's long and turbulent process of decolonisation - an explosive era marked by political upheaval and colonial conflict. End of empire provides the colourful backdrop back-drop for Georgina Sinclair's incisive examination of the role Colonial Police Service, following its creation in 1936, as efforts were made to standardize all imperial police forces and mould colonial policing to the British model. From the British Caribbean to the Middle East, the...

This is the first book-length study of the ideological foundations of British imperialism in the early twentieth century. By focussing on the heretofore understudied concept of imperial citizenship, the book illustrates how the political, cultural, and intellectual underpinnings of empire were constructed and challenged by forces in both Britain and the 'Britains Overseas, ' the settlement colonies of Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Debates about imperial citizenship reveal how Britons conceived of the empire: was it an extension of the nation-state, a collection of separate...

This is the first book to survey in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters, focusing on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, provide parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The international group of contributors, who are all scholars working at the cutting edge of these fields, place their work in the context of governmental policies, the economic bases of...

Rethinking settler colonialism focuses on the long history of contact between indigenous peoples and the white colonial communities who settled in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and South Africa.
In each of these countries these communities were displaced, marginalised and sometimes subjected to attempted genocide through the colonial process. Recently these groups have renewed their claims for greater political representation and autonomy. The essays and artwork in this book insist that an understanding of the political and cultural institutions and practices which shaped...

Race and empire tells the story of a short-lived but vehement eugenics movement that emerged among a group of Europeans in Kenya in the 1930s, unleashing a set of writings on racial differences in intelligence more extreme than that emanating from any other British colony in the twentieth century. The Kenyan eugenics movement of the 1930s adapted British ideas to the colonial environment: in all its extremity, Kenyan eugenics was not simply a bizarre and embarrassing colonial mutation, as it was later dismissed, but a logical extension of British eugenics in a colonial context. By tracing the...

The description of South Africa as a 'rainbow nation' has always been taken to embrace the black, brown and white peoples who constitute its population. But each of these groups can be sub-divided and in the white case, the Scots have made one of the most distinctive contributions to the country's history. The Scots, as in North America and Australasia, constituted an important element in the patterns of White settlement. They were already present in the area of Dutch East India Company rule and, after the first British occupation of the Cape in 1795, their numbers rose dramatically. They...