The Scottish Soldier and Empire, 1854-1902 reflects upon the iconic role of the Scottish soldier as an empire builder from the Crimean War to the end of the nineteenth century. It examines how the soldier commented on this imperial experience, largely through letter, diaries and poems published in the provincial press, how his exploits were reviewed in Scotland and how military achievements contributed to both a growing sense of national identity and a deepening degree of imperial commitment.
The British amateur military tradition of raising auxiliary forces for home defence long preceded the establishment of a standing army. This was a model that was widely emulated in British colonies. This volume of essays seeks to examine the role of citizen soldiers in Britain and its empire during the Victorian period.
The extraordinary influence of Scots in the British Empire has long been recognized. As administrators, settlers, temporary residents, professionals, plantation owners, and as military personnel, they were strikingly prominent in North America, the Caribbean, Australasia, South Africa, India, and colonies in South-East Asia and Africa. Throughout these regions they brought to bear distinctive Scottish experience as well as particular educational, economic, cultural, and religious influences. Moreover, the relationship between Scots and the British Empire had a profound effect upon many aspects of Scottish society. This volume of essays, written by notable scholars in the field, examines the key roles of Scots in central aspects of the Atlantic and imperial economies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, in East India Company rule in India, migration and the preservation of ethnic identities, the environment, the army, missionary and other religious activities, the dispersal of intellectual endeavours, and in the production of a distinctive literature rooted in colonial experience. Making use of recent, innovative research, the chapters demonstrate that an understanding of the profoundly interactive relationship between Scotland and the British Empire is vital both for the understanding of the histories of that country and of many territories of the British Empire. All scholars and general readers interested in the dispersal of intellectual ideas, key professions, Protestantism, environmental practices, and colonial literature, as well as more traditional approaches to politics, economics, and military recruitment, will find it an essential addition to the historical literature.
The concept of the border evoked by the title of the present volume provides a central interpretative key for our project at more than one level, as it is suggestive both of Scotland as a 'theoretical borderland' in relation to the Empire and postcoloniality, and of our attempt at bringing into dialogue scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, including Scottish, Celtic and postcolonial studies. The 'Scotland' of the present volume's title is thus suggestive of a critical standpoint ...
At a time of heightened international interest in the colonial dimensions of museum collections, Dividing the Spoils provides new perspectives on the motivations and circumstances whereby collections were appropriated and acquired during colonial military service. Combining approaches from the fields of material anthropology, imperial and military history, this book argues for a deeper examination of these collections within a range of intercultural histories that include alliance, diplomacy, curiosity and enquiry, as well as expropriation and cultural hegemony. As museums across Europe reckon with the post-colonial legacies of their collections, Dividing the Spoils explores how the amassing of objects was understood and governed in British military culture, and considers how objects functioned in museum collections thereafter, suggesting new avenues for sustained investigation in a controversial, contested field.
Written by leading scholars, this collection provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of modern empires. Spanning the era of modern imperial history from the early sixteenth century to the present, it challenges both the rather insular focuses on specific experiences, and gives due attention to imperial formations outside the West including the Russian, Japanese, Mughal, Ottoman and Chinese. The companion is divided into three broad sections. Part I - Times - surveys the three main eras of modern imperialism. The first was that dominated by the settlement impulse, with migrants - many voluntarily and many more by force - making new lives in the colonies. This impulse gave way, most especially in the nineteenth century, to a period of busy and rapid expansion which was less likely to promote new settlement, and in which colonists more frequently saw their sojourn in colonial lands as temporary and related to the business mostly of governance and trade. Lastly, in the twentieth century in particular, empires began to fail and to fall. Part II - Spaces - studies the principal imperial formations of the modern world. Each chapter charts the experience of a specific empire while at the same time placing it within the complex patterns of wider imperial constellations. The individual chapters thus survey the broad dynamics of change within the empires themselves and their relationships with other imperial formations, and reflect critically on the ways in which these topics have been approached in the literature. In Part III - Themes - scholars think critically about some of the key features of imperial expansion and decline. These chapters are brief and many are provocative. They reflect the current state of the field, and suggest new lines of inquiry which may follow from more comparative perspectives on empire. The broad range of themes captures the vitality and diversity of contemporary scholarship on questions of empire and colonialism, encompassing political, economic and cultural processes central to the formation and maintenance of empires as well as institutions, ideologies and social categories that shaped the lives both of those implementing and those experiencing the force of empire. In these pages the reader will find the slave and the criminal, the merchant and the maid, the scientist and the artist alongside the structures which sustained their lives and their livelihoods. Overall, the companion emphasises the diversity of imperial experience and process. Comprehensive in its scope, it draws attention to the particularities of individual empires, rather than over-generalising as if all empires, at all times, and in all places, behaved in a similar manner. It is this contingent and historical specificity that enables us to explore in expansive ways precisely what constituted the modern empire.
This book revisits some of the most significant guerrilla struggles of the late 19th century, all set in Africa, and remind readers, in light of current events, the difficulties involved in engaging in this type of conflict.
Fostered by an increasingly literate public and burgeoning populist press, the South African War—which ended the lives of many volunteer British soldiers—would catalyze a transition in British commemorative practice, foreshadowing the rituals of remembrance that engulfed Britain in the aftermath of the First World War. In this book, Peter Donaldson provides the first comprehensive look at how the British remembered the South African War and its fighters. He situates memorialization within larger Edwardian Britain, examining everything from the committees who managed memorials to the financing that supported them to the aesthetic debates that determined their forms. Through his comprehensive study of the remembrance of this single war, Donaldson illuminates the ways Britain has gone about managing history—and its sense of self within it—ever since.
This edited collection examines the British ‘way’ in counter-insurgency. It brings together and consolidates new scholarship on the counter-insurgency associated with the end of empire, foregrounding a dark and violent history of British imperial rule, one that stretched back to the nineteenth century and continued until the final collapse of the British Empire in the 1960s. The essays gathered in the collection cover the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s; they are both empirical and conceptual in tone. This edited collection pivots on the theme of the nature of the force used by Britain against colonial insurgents. It argues that the violence employed by British security forces in counter-insurgency to maintain imperial rule is best seen from a maximal perspective, contra traditional arguments that the British used minimum force to defeat colonial rebellions. Case studies are drawn from across the British Empire, covering a period of some hundred years, but they concentrate on the savage wars of decolonisation after 1945. The collection includes a historiographical essay and one on the ‘lost’ Hanslope archive by the scholar chosen by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to manage the release of the papers held. This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.
The essays in this collection show how histories written in the past, in different political times, dealt with, considered, or avoided and disavowed Britain’s imperial role and issues of difference. Ranging from enlightenment historians to the present, these essays consider both individual historians, including such key figures as E. A. Freeman, G. M. Trevelyan and Keith Hancock, and also broader themes such as the relationship between liberalism, race and historiography and how we might re-think British history in the light of trans-national, trans-imperial and cross-cultural analysis. ‘Britishness’ and what ‘British’ history is have become major cultural and political issues in our time. But as these essays demonstrate, there is no single national story: race, empire and difference have pulsed through the writing of British history. The contributors include some of the most distinguished historians writing today: C. A. Bayly, Antoinette Burton, Saul Dubow, Geoff Eley, Theodore Koditschek, Marilyn Lake, John M. MacKenzie, Karen O’Brien, Sonya O. Rose, Bill Schwarz, Kathleen Wilson.
