19th-century British imperial expansion dramatically shaped today's globalised world. Imperialism encouraged mass migrations of people, shifting flora, fauna, and commodities around the world and led to a series of radical environmental changes never before experienced in history. "Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire" explores how these networks shaped ecosystems, cultures and societies throughout the British Empire, and how they were themselves transformed by local and regional conditions.This multi-authored volume begins with a rigorous theoretical analysis of the categories of 'empire' and 'imperialism'. Its chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, draw methodologically from recent studies in environmental history, post-colonial theory, and the history of science. Together, these perspectives provide a comprehensive historical understanding of how the British Empire reshaped the globe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book will be an important addition to the literature on British imperialism and global ecological change.

During the 1930s, much of the world was in severe economic and political crisis. This upheaval ushered in new ways of thinking about social and political systems. In some cases, these new ideas transformed states and empires alike. Particularly in Europe, these transformations are well-chronicled in scholarship. In academic writings on India, however, Muslim political and legal thought has gone relatively unnoticed during this eventful decade. This book fills this gap by mapping the evolution of Muslim political and legal thought from roughly 1927 to 1940. By looking at landmark court cases in tandem with the political and legal ideas of Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding fathers, this book highlights the more concealed ways in which Indian Muslims began to acquire a political outlook with distinctly separatist aspirations. What makes this period worthy of a separate study is that the legal antagonism between religious communities in the 1930s foreshadowed political conflicts that arose in the run-up to independence in 1947. The presented cases and thinkers reflect the possibilities and limitations of Muslim political thought in colonial India.

This volume offers a comparative survey of diverse settler colonial experiences in relation to food, food culture and foodways - how the latter are constructed, maintained, revolutionised and, in some cases, dissolved. What do settler colonial foodways and food cultures look like? Are they based on an imagined colonial heritage, do they embrace indigenous repertoires or invent new hybridised foodscapes? What are the socio-economic and political dynamics of these cultural transformations? In particular, this volume focuses on three key issues: the evolution of settler colonial identities and states; their relations vis-a-vis indigenous populations; and settlers' self-indigenisation - the process through which settlers transform themselves into the native population, at least in their own eyes. These three key issues are crucial in understanding settler-indigenous relations and the rise of settler colonial identities and states.

This book reconstructs the connection between religion and migration, drawing on post-colonial perspectives to shed light on what religion can contribute to migrant encounters. Examining the resources and motives for hospitality as lived in Christian contexts in the Nordic region, it addresses the content of talk about "religion" in public discourse, the concept having become something of an empty signifier in debates surrounding migration. Multidisciplinary in approach, this volume demonstrates that "religion" is not, in fact, an empty signifier, but gains substance through practice and interpretation. Considering the undeveloped potentiality of religion and the manner in which the unseen religious perspective in secularity becomes manifest in practice, this volume will appeal to social scientists and scholars of religion with interests in migration, refugee studies, theology, and Christian practice.

How should failed states in Africa be understood? Catherine Scott here critically engages with the concept of state failure and provides an historical reinterpretation. She shows that, although the concept emerged in the context of the post-Cold War new world order, the phenomenon has been attendant throughout (and even before) the development of the Westphalian state system. Contemporary failed states, however, differ from their historical counterparts in one fundamental respect: they fail within their existing borders and continue to be recognised as something that they are not. This peculiarity derives from international norms instituted in the era of decolonisation, which resulted in the inviolability of state borders and the supposed universality of statehood. Scott argues that contemporary failed states are, in fact, failed post-colonies. Thus understood, state failure is less the failure of existing states and more the failed rooting and institutionalisation of imported and reified models of Western statehood. Drawing on insights from the histories of Uganda and Burundi, from pre-colonial polity formation to the present day, she explores why and how there have been failures to create effective and legitimate national states within the bounds of inherited colonial jurisdictions on much of the African continent.

"Britain in the Middle East" provides a comprehensive survey of British involvement in the Middle East, exploring their mutual construction and influence across the entire historical sweep of their relationship. In the 17th century, Britain was establishing trade links in the Middle East, using its position in India to increasingly exclude other European powers. Over the coming centuries this commercial influence developed into political power and finally formal empire, as the British sought to control their regional hegemony through military force. Robert Harrison charts this relationship, exploring how the Middle East served as the launchpad for British offensive action in the World Wars, and how resentment against colonial rule in the region led ultimately to political and Islamic revolutions and Britain's demise as a global, imperial power.

South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general.
The essays in this collection address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, environmental, social, cultural, ideological, and intellectual contexts which informed, and were in turn informed by, these interactions. Particular attention is paid to a cluster of binary oppositions that have hitherto framed South Asian history, namely colonizer/colonized, imperialism/nationalism, and modernity/tradition, and how new analytical frameworks are emerging which enable us to think beyond the constraints imposed by these binaries. Closer attention to regional dynamics as well as to wider global forces has enriched our understanding of the history of South Asia within a wider imperial matrix. Previous impressions of all-powerful imperialism, with the capacity to reshape all before it, for good or ill, are rejected in favour of a much more nuanced image of imperialism in India that acknowledges the impact as well as the intentions of colonialism, but within a much more complicated historical landscape where other processes are at work.

How did those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century settler empire render colonization compatible with humanitarianism? Avoiding a cynical or celebratory response, this book takes seriously the humane disposition of colonial officials, examining the relationship between humanitarian governance and empire. The story of 'humane' colonial governance connects projects of emancipation, amelioration, conciliation, protection and development in sites ranging from British Honduras through Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, New Zealand and Canada to India. It is seen in the lives of governors like George Arthur and George Grey, whose careers saw the violent and destructive colonization of indigenous peoples at the hands of British emigrants. The story challenges the exclusion of officials' humanitarian sensibilities from colonial history and places the settler colonies within the larger historical context of Western humanitarianism.

Most histories of European appropriation of indigenous territories have, until recently, focused on conquest and occupation, while relatively little attention has been paid to the history of treaty-making. Yet treaties were also a means of extending empire. To grasp the extent of European legal engagement with indigenous peoples, Empire by Treaty: Negotiating European Expansion, 1600-1900 looks at the history of treaty-making in European empires (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French and British) from the early 17th to the late 19th century, that is, during both stages of European imperialism. While scholars have often dismissed treaties assuming that they would have been fraudulent or unequal, this book argues that there was more to the practice of treaty-making than mere commercial and political opportunism. Indeed, treaty-making was also promoted by Europeans as a more legitimate means of appropriating indigenous sovereignties and acquiring land than were conquest or occupation, and therefore as a way to reconcile expansion with moral and juridical legitimacy. As for indigenous peoples, they engaged in treaty-making as a way to further their interests even if, on the whole, they gained far less than the Europeans from those agreements and often less than they bargained for. The vexed history of treaty-making presents particular challenges for the great expectations placed in treaties for the resolution of conflicts over indigenous rights in post-colonial societies. These hopes are held by both indigenous peoples and representatives of the post-colonial state and yet, both must come to terms with the complex and troubled history of treaty-making over 400 years of empire. Empire by Treaty looks at treaty-making in Dutch Colonial Expansion, Spanish-Portuguese border in the Americas, Aboriginal Land in Canada, French Colonial West Africa, and British India.

This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues are represented in fiction. Wright creates a provocative discourse in which the fields of postcolonial theory and ecocriticism are brought together.
Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and globalization as depicted in an array of international works of fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda's "The Heart of Redness "(South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's "Petals of Blood" (Kenya), that deal with the potentially devastating effects of development, particularly through deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee's "Disgrace" (South Africa), Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" (India and Canada), and Joy Williams's "The Quick and the Dead" (United States) to explore the use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals. The third chapter deals with India's water crisis via Arundhati Roy's activism and her novel, "The God of Small Things." Finally, Wright looks at three novels--Flora Nwapa's "Efuru" (Nigeria), Keri Hulme's "The Bone People" (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona's "Mother to Mother" (South Africa)--that depict women's relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed.
Throughout "Wilderness into Civilized Shapes," Wright rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western commodification and resource-based imperialism.

Schooling Diaspora relates the previously untold story of twentieth-century female education and Chinese students living overseas in British Malaya and Singapore. Traversing more than a century of British imperialism, Chinese migration, and Southeast Asian nationalism, this book explores the pioneering English- and Chinese-language girls' schools in which these women studied and worked, drawing on school records, missionary annals, colonial reports, periodicals, and oral interviews. The history of educated overseas Chinese girls and women reveals the surprising reach of transnational female affiliations and activities in an age commonly assumed to be male dominated. These women created and joined networks in schools, workplaces, associations, and politics. They influenced notions of labor and social relations in Asian and European societies. They were at the center of political debates over language and ethnicity, and were vital actors in struggles over twentieth-century national belonging. Their education empowered them to defy certain socio-cultural conventions, in ways that school founders and political authorities did not anticipate. At the same time, they contended with an elite male discourse that perpetuated patriarchal views of gender, culture, and nation. Even as their schooling propelled them into a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic public space, Chinese girls and women in diaspora often had to take sides as Malayan and Singaporean society became polarized-sometimes falsely-into mutually exclusive groups of British loyalists, pro-China nationalists, and Southeast Asian citizens. They negotiated these constraints to build unique identities, ultimately contributing to the development of a new figure: the educated transnational Chinese woman.

Belonging across the Bay of Bengal discusses themes connecting the regions bordering the Bay of Bengal, mainly covering the period from the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries - a crucial period of transition from colonialism to independence. Focusing on the notion of 'belonging', the chapters in this collection highlight themes of ethnicity, religion, culture and the emergence of nationalist politics and state policies as they relate to the movement of peoples in the region. While the Indian Ocean has been of interest to scholars for decades, there has been a notable tilt towards historicizing the Western half of that space, often prioritizing Islamic trade as the key connective glue prior to the rise of Western power and the later emergence of transnational Indian nationalism. Belonging across the Bay of Bengal enriches this story by drawing attention to Buddhist and migrant connectivities, introducing discussions of Lanka, Burma and the Straits Settlements to establish the historical context of the current refugee crises playing out in these regions. This is a timely and innovative volume that offers a fresh approach to Indian Ocean history, further enriching our understanding of the current debates over minority rights and refugee problems in the region. It will be of great significance to all students and scholars of Indian Ocean studies as well as historians of modern South and Southeast Asia.

Colonial agents worked for fifty years to make a Japanese Taiwan, using technology, culture, statistics, trade, and modern ideologies to remake their new territory according to evolving ideas of Japanese empire. Since the end of the Pacific War, this project has been remembered, imagined, nostalgized, erased, commodified, manipulated, idealized and condemned by different sectors of Taiwan's population. ""The volume covers a range of topics, ""including colonial-era photography, exploration, postwar deportation, sport, film, media, economic planning, contemporary Japanese influences on Taiwanese popular culture, and recent nostalgia for and misunderstandings about the colonial era. "Japanese Taiwan" provides an inter-disciplinary perspective on these related processes of colonization and decolonization, explaining how the memories, scars and traumas of the colonial era have been utilized during the postwar period. It provides a unique critique of the 'Japaneseness' of the erstwhile Chinese Taiwan, thus bringing new scholarship to bear on problems in contemporary East Asian politics.

The most important conflicts in the founding of the English colonies and the American republic were fought against enemies either totally outside of their society or within it: barbarians or brothers. In this work, Wayne E. Lee presents a searching exploration of early modern English and American warfare, looking at the sixteenth-century wars in Ireland, the English Civil War, the colonial Anglo-Indian wars, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War.
Crucial to the level of violence in each of these conflicts was the perception of the enemy as either a brother (a fellow countryman) or a barbarian. But Lee goes beyond issues of ethnicity and race to explore how culture, strategy, and logistics also determined the nature of the fighting. Each conflict contributed to the development of American attitudes toward war. The brutal nature of English warfare in Ireland helped shape the military methods the English employed in North America, just as the legacy of the English Civil War cautioned American colonists about the need to restrain soldiers' behavior. Nonetheless, Anglo-Americans waged war against Indians with terrifying violence, in part because Native Americans' system of restraints on warfare diverged from European traditions. The Americans then struggled during the Revolution to reconcile these two different trends of restraint and violence when fighting various enemies.
Through compelling campaign narratives, Lee explores the lives and fears of soldiers, as well as the strategies of their commanders, while showing how their collective choices determined the nature of wartime violence. In the end, the repeated experience of wars with barbarians or brothers created an American culture of war that demanded absolute solutions: enemies were either to be incorporated or rejected. And that determination played a major role in defining the violence used against them.

Migration and Empire provides a unique comparison of the motives, means, and experiences of three main flows of empire migrants. During the nineteenth century, the proportion of UK migrants heading to empire destinations, especially to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, increased substantially and remained high. These migrants included so-called 'surplus women' and 'children in need', shipped overseas to ease perceived social problems at home. Empire migrants also included entrepreneurs and indentured labourers from south Asia, Africa, and the Pacific (together with others from the Far East, outside the empire), who relocated in huge numbers with equally transformative effects in, for example, central and southern Africa, the Caribbean, Ceylon, Mauritius, and Fiji. The UK at the core of empire was also the recipient of empire migrants, especially from the 'New Commonwealth' after 1945.
These several migration flows are analysed with a strong appreciation of the commonality and the complex variety of migrant histories. The volume includes discussion of the work of philanthropists (especially with respect to single women and 'children in care') as well as governments and entrepreneurs in organising much empire migration, and the business of recruiting, assisting, and transporting selected empire migrants. Attention is given to immigration controls that restricted the settlement of some non-white migrants, and to the mixture of motives explaining return-migration. The study concludes by indicating why the special relationship between empire and migration came to an end. Legacies remain, but by the 1970s political change and shifts in the global labour market had eroded the earlier patterns.

This book is a history of the three Guianas, now known as Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. Though histories of each of the countries exist, this is the first work in a century to consider the three countries as a group, and thus the first to present the history of all three as a comparative and overarching study. Special emphasis has been given to the story of how each colony was administered by Britain, the Netherlands, and France respectively, and how these differing colonial administrative policies have given rise to three vastly different cultures. Because the geographical area of the Guianas is relatively small, the indigenous population at the time of contact was relatively uniform across the area, and the external pressures on the three colonies over their histories exhibited significant similarities, the book presents the Guianas as an ideal laboratory in which to study the effects of imperialism and cultural assimilation practices. The book also briefly considers the present political and cultural status of the three polities and makes some projections about their possible futures. In all, the book presents a complete history from prehistory until the present day covering the entirety of the Guianas region, relating a colorful history from a little-studied corner of the world.

J. A. Hobson's critical treatise on the practice of imperialism - whereby countries acquire territories for economic gain - is a classic in its field. This edition includes all of the author's original charts and illustrations. Published at the opening of the 20th century, while colonial imperialism still held decisive sway as a political and social practice, Hobson's treatise caused shockwaves in economics for its condemnation of a procedure long considered irreproachable. While Hobson acknowledges that imperialism is often supported by a sense of nationalistic pride and achievement - as with the British Empire's colonial imperialism - he identifies capitalist oligarchy as the true motivation behind imperialistic ventures. Owners of productive capital, such as factories, generate a large surplus which they desire to reinvest in further factories; this prompts imperialist expansion into foreign lands.

In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political economy of empire, early American art and poetry, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century.

Humanizing LIS Education and Practice: Diversity by Design demonstrates that diversity concerns are relevant to all and need to be approached in a systematic way. Developing the Diversity by Design concept articulated by Dali and Caidi in 2017, the book promotes the notion of the diversity mindset. Grouped into three parts, the chapters within this volume have been written by an international team of seasoned academics and practitioners who make diversity integral to their professional and scholarly activities. Building on the Diversity by Design approach, the book presents case studies with practice models for two primary audiences: LIS educators and LIS practitioners. Chapters cover a range of issues, including, but not limited to, academic promotion and tenure; the decolonization of LIS education; engaging Indigenous and multicultural communities; librarians' professional development in diversity and social justice; and the decolonization of library access practices and policies. As a collection, the book illustrates a systems-thinking approach to fostering diversity and inclusion in LIS, integrating it by design into the LIS curriculum and professional practice. Calling on individuals, organizations, policymakers, and LIS educators to make diversity integral to their daily activities and curriculum, Humanizing LIS Education and Practice: Diversity by Design will be of interest to anyone engaged in research and professional practice in Library and Information Science.

This book explores the history and agendas of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) through its activities in South Asia. Focusing on interactions between American 'Y' workers and the local population, representatives of the British colonial state, and a host of international actors, it assesses their impact on the making of modern India. In turn, it shows how the knowledge and experience acquired by the Y in South Asia had a significant impact on US foreign policy, diplomacy and development programs in the region from the mid-1940s. Exploring the 'secular' projects launched by the YMCA such as new forms of sport, philanthropic efforts and educational endeavours, The YMCA in Late Colonial India addresses broader issues about the persistent role of religion in global modernization processes, the accumulation of American soft power in Asia, and the entanglement of American imperialism with other colonial empires. It provides an unusually rich case study to explore how 'global civil society' emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, how it related to the prevailing imperial world order, and how cultural specificities affected the ways in which it unfolded. Offering fresh perspectives on the historical trajectories of America's 'moral empire', Christian internationalism and the history of international organizations more broadly, this book also gives an insight into the history of South Asia during an age of colonial reformism and decolonization. It shows how international actors contributed to the shaping of South Asia's modernity at this crucial point, and left a lasting legacy in the region.

Drawing on materials ranging from archaeological findings to recent studies of migration issues and drug violence, William H. Beezley provides a dramatic narrative of human events as he recounts the story of Mexico in the context of world history. Beginning with the Mayan and Aztec civilizations and their brutal defeat at the hands of the Conquistadors, Beezley highlights the penetrating effect of Spain's three-hundred-year colonial rule, during which Mexico became a multicultural society marked by Roman Catholicism and the Spanish language. Independence, he shows, was likewise marked by foreign invasions and huge territorial losses, this time at the hands of the United States, who annexed a vast land mass-including the states of Texas, New Mexico, and California-and remained a powerful presence along the border. The 1910 revolution propelled land, educational, and public health reforms, but later governments turned to authoritarian rule, personal profits, and marginalization of rural, indigenous, and poor Mexicans. Throughout this eventful chronicle, Beezley highlights the people and international forces that shaped Mexico's rich and tumultuous history.

Throughout history the British Atlantic has often been depicted as a series of well-ordered colonial ports that functioned as nodes of Atlantic shipping, where orderliness reflected the effectiveness of the regulatory apparatus constructed to contain Atlantic commerce. Colonial ports were governable places where British vessels, and only British vessels, were to deliver English goods in exchange for colonial produce. Yet behind these sanitized depictions lay another story, one about the porousness of commercial regulation, the informality and persistent illegality of exchanges in the British Empire, and the endurance of a culture of cross-national cooperation in the Atlantic that had been forged in the first decades of European settlement and still resonated a century later.

In "Empire at the Periphery," Christian J. Koot examines the networks that connected British settlers in New York and the Caribbean and Dutch traders in the Netherlands and in the Dutch colonies in North America and the Caribbean, demonstrating that these interimperial relationships formed a core part of commercial activity in the early Atlantic World, operating alongside British trade. Koot provides unique consideration of how local circumstances shaped imperial development, reminding us that empires consisted not only of elites dictating imperial growth from world capitals, but also of ordinary settlers in far-flung colonial outposts, who often had more in common with--and a greater reliance on--people from foreign empires who shared their experiences of living at the edge of a fragile, transitional world.

Part of the series "Early American Places"

In Rock | Water | Life, Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation.

Green analyses conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice.

Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonising science; the potential for a politics of soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management, and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.

How and why did the Congolese elite turn from loyal intermediaries into opponents of the colonial state? This book seeks to enrich our understanding of the political and cultural processes culminating in the tumultuous decolonization of the Belgian Congo. Focusing on the making of an African bourgeoisie, the book illuminates the so-called evolues' social worlds, cultural self-representations, daily life and political struggles. https://youtu.be/c8ybPCi80dc