This book explores the tensions underlying British imperialism in Cyprus. Much has been written about the British empire's construction outside Europe, yet there is little on the same themes in Britain's tiny empire in 'Europe'. This study explores whether the assumptions and findings made about imperial rule outside Europe hold true in a 'European space'. Varnava follows Cyprus's progress from a perceived imperial asset to an expendable backwater by explaining how the Union Jack came to fly over the island and why after thirty-five years the British wanted it lowered. Cyprus's importance was...

This study assesses the significance of the hunting cult as a major element of the imperial experience in Africa and Asia. Through a study of the game laws and the beginnings of conservation in the 19th and early-20th centuries, the author demonstrates the racial inequalities which existed between Europeans and indigenous hunters. Africans were denied access to game, and the development of game reserves and national parks accelerated this process. Indigenous hunters in Africa and India were turned into "poachers" and only Europeans were permitted to hunt. In India, the hunting of animals...

On the eve of World War II, a small, impoverished group of Africans and West Indians in London dared to imagine the unimaginable: the end of British rule in Africa. In books, pamphlets, and periodicals, they launched an anti-colonial campaign that used publishing as a pathway to liberation. These writers included West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Ras Makonnen, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leone's I. T. A. Wallace Johnson. Polsgrove draws on previously unexplored manuscript and archival collections to trace the development of this publishing community from its origins in...

In the new world order mapped out by Japanese and Western imperialism in East Asia after the mid-nineteenth century opium wars, communities of merchants and settlers took root in China and Korea. New identities were constructed, new modes of collaboration formed and new boundaries between the indigenous and foreign communities were literally and figuratively established. Newly available in paperback, this pioneering and comparative study of Western and Japanese imperialism examines European, American and Japanese communities in China and Korea, and challenges received notions of agency and...

Between 1803 and 1853, some 80,000 convicts were transported to Van Diemen's Land. Revising established models of the colonies, which tend to depict convict women as a peculiarly oppressed group, Gender, crime and empire argues that convict men and women in fact shared much in common. Placing men and women, ideas about masculinity, femininity, sexuality and the body, in comparative perspective, this book argues that historians must take fuller account of class to understand the relationships between gender and power. The book explores the ways in which ideas about fatherhood and household...

This is the first book-length study to focus primarily on the role of class in the encounter between South Asians and British institutions in the United Kingdom at the height of British imperialism. In a departure from previous scholarship on the South Asian presence in Britain, Wainwright emphasizes the importance of class as the register through which British polite society interpreted other social distinctions such as race, gender, and religion. Drawing mainly on unpublished material from the India Office Records, the National Archives, and private collections of charitable organizations,...

Much has been written about time in Western society. But how did 'the rest' of the world come to share the West's dominant view of time? Who were the first emissaries of the culture of the clock? And, most importantly, by what means did they gain a following? The colonisation of time is a highly original and long overdue examination of the ways that western-European and specifically British concepts and rituals of time were imposed on other cultures as a fundamental component of colonisation during the nineteenth century. Based on a wealth of primary sources, and a comparative analysis of two...

This is a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the neglected influences of nation, empire and race upon the development and electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in Britain and the Australian Labor Party from their formative years of the 1900s to the elections of 2010. Based upon extensive primary and secondary source-based research in Britain and Australia over several years, it makes a new and original contribution to the fields of labour, imperial and 'British world' history. The book offers the challenging conclusion that the forces of nation, empire and race exerted much...

Borders and conflict in South Asia is the first full-length study of the 1947 drawing of the Indo-Pakistani boundary in Punjab. Using the Radcliffe commission as a window onto the decolonisation and independence of India and Pakistan, and examining the competing interests - both internal and international - that influenced the actions of the various major players, it highlights British efforts to maintain a grip on India even as the decolonisation process spun out of control. Drawing on extensive archival research in India, Pakistan and Britain, combined with innovative use of cartographic...

Available in paperback for the first time, Married to the empire situates women at the centre of the practices and policies of British imperialism. Rebutting interpretations that have marginalised women in the empire, this book demonstrates that women were crucial to establishing and sustaining the British Raj in India from the 'High Noon' of imperialism in the late nineteenth century through to Indian independence in 1947. Using three separate modes of engagement with imperialism - domesticity, violence and race - it demonstrates the many and varied ways in which British women, particularly...