Emily J. Manktelow - Böcker

This book examines the role of Scottish Enlightenment ideas of belonging in the construction and circulation of white supremacist thought that sought to justify British imperial rule. During the 18th century, European imperial expansion radically increased population mobility through the forging of new trade routes, war, disease, enslavement and displacement. In this book, Onni Gust argues that this mass movement intersected with philosophical debates over what it meant to belong to a nation, civilization, and even humanity itself.Unhomely Empire maps the consolidation of a Scottish Enlightenment discourse of ‘home’ and ‘exile’ through three inter-related case studies and debates; slavery and abolition in the Caribbean, Scottish Highland emigration to North America, and raising white girls in colonial India. Playing out over poetry, political pamphlets, travel writing, philosophy, letters and diaries, these debates offer a unique insight into the movement of ideas across a British imperial literary network. Using this rich cultural material, Gust argues that whiteness was central to 19th-century liberal imperialism’s understanding of belonging, whilst emotional attachment and the perceived ability, or inability, to belong were key concepts in constructions of racial difference.

In 1843 on the island of Tahiti the evangelical missionary Rev. Alexander Simpson was accused of sexually assaulting three of the female students under his care, and of taking ‘improper liberties’ with at least three more. The events did not come out in public for at least a decade, while Simpson’s power in the local community only grew and rumblings relating to his wrong-doings were ruthlessly ‘crushed’. By exploring the case of Rev. Simpson, Emily Manktelow gives us key insights into the gender, power and racial dynamics of a particular case of sexual abuse on the frontiers of European colonialism. She explores the social and sexual context of clerical abuse, considers the hierarchies of gender and power that determined how the case was handled, and investigates the nature of colonialism, gender and abuse in the 19th century.The uncomfortably timely content of Gender, Power and Sexual Abuse in the Pacific allows us to interrogate the way we deal with and represent issues of abuse, authority and childhood. It aims to give voice to those whom the archive has silenced, and to listen to what they have to tell us about gender, sexuality and abuse in the modern world.

Analysing three cases of British colonial violence that occurred in the latter half of the 19th century, this book argues that all three share commonalities, including the role of racial prejudices in justifying the perpetration of extreme colonial violence. Exploring the connections and comparisons between the Perak War (1875–76), the ‘Hut Tax’ Revolt in Sierra Leone (1898–99) and the Anglo-Egyptian War of Reconquest in the Sudan (1896–99), Gordon highlights the significance of decision-making processes, communication between London and the periphery and the influence of individual colonial administrators in outbreaks of violence.This study reveals the ways in which racial prejudices, the advocacy of a British ‘civilising mission’ and British racial ‘superiority’ informed colonial administrators’ decisions on the ground, as well as the rationalisation of extreme violence. Responding to a neglect of British colonial atrocities within the historiography of colonial violence, this work demonstrates the ways in which Britain was just as willing and able as other European Empires to resort to extreme measures in the face of indigenous resistance or threats to the British imperial project.

This book explores debates about East India Company colonialism that took place on the lecture circuits of Britain, in the meeting houses of Calcutta, and at the Mughal court in Delhi in the late 1830s and 1840s. In the decades that followed the Emancipation Act (1833) British abolitionists and colonial philanthropists turned their attention to conditions across the empire, sometimes collaborating with colonised groups to challenge the impositions and iniquities of British colonial rule and sometimes prescribing their own vision of how an imperial relationship should look.This book uses the travels, experiences, and activism of anti-slavery lecturer and East India reformer George Thompson as a starting point for a wider exploration and reassessment of the ways in which Company rule in India was challenged in the decades before the Indian Uprising of 1857. An important organiser in the campaign for East India reform as the main spokesperson for the Aborigines Protection Society and a champion of the causes of Indian rulers such as Pratap Singh and Bahadur Shah Zafar, Thompson was also a flawed character. As a paid agent, he was remunerated for his activism and accusations of pecuniary self-interest were never far away. His story therefore offers important insights into the limitations of early anti-colonial sentiment, and the problems of cosmopolitan collaboration in colonial contexts. By exploring early Victorian debates about India’s commercial potential, role in the imperial labour market, and place within an increasingly interconnected post-emancipation empire, the book seeks to contextualise evolving ideas regarding Britain’s humanitarian responsibilities towards her ‘fellow subjects in the East’, and how these connected with, and were superseded by, nascent forms of Indian anti-colonialism, political protest, and civic activism.

In the early 20th century, women across the British Isles united to fight for the right to vote, for fair pay and good working conditions, and for an end to war, but what did this unity look like across the colonial border between Ireland and England? This book offers a fresh perspective on the history of empire and feminism by exploring the changing nature of political solidarity between English and Irish feminists, socialists, and pacifists during the first two decades of the twentieth century.Demonstrating how Ireland offered English women a space in which to act upon their patriotic duty as ‘mothers’ of empire in order to alleviate the degraded status of their ‘colonial sisters’, Geraghty shows how this imperial feminism was an integral part of English women’s demand for political freedoms. Their political ideologies, shaped during a time of heightened imperial loyalties, did not disappear with the gaining of partial franchise in 1918, but remained a pervasive part of their politics and impacted the ways in which they engaged with the Irish struggle for independence and Irish women’s political emancipation. Imperial Feminists exposes the difficulties of building and maintaining grassroots feminist and socialist solidarities at a time of heightened imperial loyalties and changing internationalist politics.

This book paints a detailed picture of how anti-colonial publishing operated from the very heart of the British Empire in the middle of the 20th century. Pointing to the vibrant interconnections between anti-colonial and Pan-African activists in Britain, it engages with their personal politics, political thought, and global links to recast how we think about both publishing and anti-colonialism at this time. It engages with activists on their own terms through a book history approach, one that takes seriously the printed manifestations of anti-colonial thought, and views printing and publishing as political activism.Assessing various forms of Pan-African writing, from pamphlets and journals to novels and works of anthropology, this book unpacks how different activists ‘did’ their politics, and what these politics were. Delving into the literary works that supported and maintained British Pan-African activism, Writing Against Empire highlights the central and crucial role of written texts to this movement. Unpicking the links between different thinkers and their works, and analysing how such a wealth of anti-colonial writers could operate within the very core of empire, Bowman gets to the heart of anti-colonial action in 20th-century Britain, and the centrality of print to this struggle.

The making of multicultural Britain is often dated to the arrival of the Windrush in 1948, but this obscures the lives of the many colonized migrants who were already surviving, and often thriving, in the metropole long before 1948.This book follows early twentieth century migrants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean from their recruitment in the colonies through their varied exploits and experiences in Britain. It affords a window into life in multicultural working-class settlements before and between the world wars, offering unprecedented granular detail about who such migrants were, where they came from and moved to, how their networks and institutions in Britain functioned, how much they mixed with and married local people, and whether these patterns persisted or altered as new waves of migrants joined them over time.Weaving multiple stories together, Colonized Migrants in Imperial Britain tells of the opportunities seized; the networks, communities and kin that were sustained; and the strategies used to make ends meet. Often marginalised, policed and subordinated, this book shows how colonized migrants overcame formidable institutional obstacles to take part in, enrich, and build modern British society.