Cambridge Commonwealth Series – serie

Current interest in Britain's imperial past and the loss of her formal empire since World War II is substantial.

'...it is well written, balanced and comprehensive. It splendidly incorporates the new work of the last twenty years as no one else has and it will be the starting point for everyone doing any work, from sixth forms upwards, on modern India.' D.A.Low

In 19th century settler colonies such as Upper Canada, New South Wales and New Zealand, governors not only administered, they stood at the head of colonial society and ordered the festivities and ceremonies around which colonial life centred. Governors were also expected to be repositories of political wisdom and constitutional lore. In addition, they were popularly credited with responsibility for prosperity, education and culture. So much prominence brought criticism as well. Governors were almost always burned in effigy and were frequently the target of scurrilous and libellous comment in their colony. They were transfigured as ideal rulers and disfigured as the embodiments of tyranny and personal vices. They played the symbolic roles of hero and sacrificial victim in the emerging settler societies. This is an exploration of the public and private beliefs of governors such as Sir Thomas Brisbane, Sir John Colborne, Sir George Grey and Lord Elgin as they struggled to survive in colonial cultures which both defied and vilified their personal qualities.

In 1990 approximately ten per cent of Indian babies died in their first year - but in Kerala state on the southwestern coast, infant mortality was less than three per cent. Kerala also boasted India's longest life expectancy and highest female literacy in India. Yet Kerala's per capita income was less than the lowly national average. The so-called Kerala Model has teased scholars and policy-makers since the 1970s. Is it possible to achieve a tolerable standard of living without the immense costs of industrial or political revolutions? This book argues that the disintegration of matrilineal social structure and a rigid system of caste generated widespread politicization. In this process, though women both lost and gained, they have retained a position of autonomy unique in India. This book explains how this combination of politics and women has produced the supposed "well-being" associated with the Kerala Model. For people interested in comparative politics, development policy and the position of women in society, this book examines key issues.Historians of South Asia will also find a social history that pushes beyond the conventional stopping date of 1947 - into the 1990s and the implications of the Gulf crisis for Kerala and its hundreds of thousands of Gulf-based workers.

This collection includes contributions from some of the major authors in the field. The critical essays have been chosen with the intention of opening up possibilities, marking out boundaries and setting objectives in the expanding field of international literature in English. New literary and critical practices are derived from the problematic role of English as an international language and from its relations with other languages. Values of cultural difference and particularity are emphasized. This work is intended for use in departments of literature (courses in 20th-century literature, Commonwealth literature, post-colonial literature, and Commonwealth studies.

In 1838 Lord Melbourne's Whig government in Britain sent the radical Lord Durham to Canada as Governor-General to deal with a colony in the aftermath of a rebellion. Durham's vanity and arrogance made him a poor choice for the post, and he resigned a few months later after the government had been forced to overrule him for exceeding his powers. After his return to Britain he wrote his Report on the Affairs of British North America - and its unauthorized publication in the Times caused a sensation. This report - the famous 'Durham Report' - has been seen as the starting point of the British tradition of colonial self-rule leading through the Statute of Westminster of 1931 to the independent self-governing Commonwealth of today.

This book studies the relations between Britain and Canada from the end of the First World War to the Imperial Conference of 1926. It is concerned principally with the problems of imperial co-operation and consultation in foreign affairs and defence policy, and with the pressures developing out of these problems to reformulate the constitutional relations of Britain and her dominions. In the course of examining Canadian attempts to redefine empire-commonwealth relationships this book also throws fresh light on the evolution of British attitudes to the dominions during these years. Often there were serious policy disagreements in Whitehall - the Colonial Office preferring to conciliate, the Foreign Office to challenge the overseas governments - and Dr Wigley, with close attention to official and private papers, shows clearly that developments in this period owed far more to Britain's own responses and priorities than has been previously realised.

Belize (formerly British Honduras) is a residue of the British Empire and the last colony in the Americas. Like most colonies in this age of decolonisation Belize was willing to break the colonial ties and in fact achieved internal self-government in 1964. It is, however, deterred from taking its full independence by Guatemala's century-old claim to its territory, a claim famous in international law. Belize is more than a British enclave in Central America, it is a meeting place, the borderland of two quite different cultural worlds. These are the White - Creole - Carib and the Spanish - Mestizo - Indian complexes which together produce among Belize's 120,000 inhabitants a racial, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity that is unusual either in the Commonwealth Caribbean or in Central America. There Belize's distinctiveness ends. Structurally, it is as economically dependent as its neighbours. Endowed with luxuriant forest resources, it was from the start a classical example of colonial exploitation, of taking away and not giving back in terms of permanent improvement and capital development. It was only when the forest resources were depleted after the Second World War that its other natural resource, agriculture, received attention.

In the 1870s Britain dominated the coast of east Africa by informal influence exerted from Zanzibar through the renowned consul-general, Sir John Kirk. This unchallenged position ended with the decision of Bismarck to back Carl Peters in his treaty-making activities and the mainland opposite Zanzibar was partitioned in 1886 into British and German spheres. The British government was not willing to assume the responsibility and expense involved in administration of its area of influence and it assigned control to the Imperial British East Africa Company headed by William Mackinnon. The company's life was short and inglorious. The government attributed its failure to the ineffectuality of Mackinnon and the Company's directors blamed the government for using the Company to advance political objects and not providing it with proper support. Professor Galbraith's book considers this episode in British Imperial History, the factors involved and Mackinnon's part in it. The book considers the interaction of Mackinnon and the government from the 1870s when his first efforts in east Africa were frustrated by Salisbury to the liquidation of the Company in the mid-1890s.

In the belief that intensive study of selected local areas is an important development in scholarship on Africa, the author presents a micropolitical study of an important region of one of East Africa's Rew nations. Sukumaland, an area of Tanzania which contains one tenth of the country's population and its largest tribe, was chosen for the study. Before independence it exhibited the most organized nationalist political activity of any part of the country and developed the largest African-owned co-operative movement in all of Africa. In the final decade of the colonial era Sukumaland was the British administration's principal experimental area for attempts at radical transformation of indigenous political institutions and traditional agricultural techniques. After independence it became a critical testing ground for President Julius Nyerere's concepts of African socialism.

The Scramble for Southern Africa formed one of the most dramatic episodes in the more general European assault on Africa by the forces of the New Imperialism in the later nineteenth century. This book offers a fresh reappraisal of the complex sequence of events that surrounded the Partition of Africa south of the Zambesi in the years 1877-95. The Scramble for Southern Africa was, as Professor Schreuder powerfully argues, really a scramble for mastery of the land and its resources - both physical and human - and not merely a diplomatic strategy. The era of the Scramble made the white man master of Southern Africa; it was left to the years of the 'South African War', 1899-1902, and the decade of Unification to 1910, to decide which white men were to be the ultimate masters.

The particular contribution of the Cambridge Conferences on Development was to gather together practical administrators and technical specialists in many fields so that they can examine together a particular problem in development strategy for the Third World. This 1971 volume selects some of the most important papers which were delivered during the 1960s, and presents them as a contribution to the discussion on how economic development could best be planned and advanced. Interspersed amongst the more technical papers are summaries and comments by Ronald Robinson summarising the consensus and divergence of views revealed in the conferences' debates throughout the decade. This book is unusual and valuable in providing the working experience of the practitioners themselves - the public servants, planners and advisers of the decade - in their task of making poor countries richer.