Stanford British Histories – serie

Losing Hearts and Minds explores the loss of British power and prestige in colonial Singapore and Malaya from the First World War to the Malayan Emergency. During this period, British leaders relied on a growing number of Asian, European and Eurasian allies and servicepeople, including servants, police, soldiers, and medical professionals, to maintain their empire. At the same time, British institutions and leaders continued to use racial and gender violence to wage war. As a result, those colonial subjects closest to British power frequently experienced the limits of belonging and the broken promises of imperial inclusion, hastening the end of British rule in Southeast Asia.From the World Wars to the Cold War, European, Indigenous, Chinese, Malay, and Indian civilians resisted or collaborated with British and Commonwealth soldiers, rebellious Indian troops, invading Japanese combatants, and communists. Historian Kate Imy tells the story of how Singapore and Malaya became sites of some of the most impactful military and anti-colonial conflicts of the twentieth century, where British military leaders repeatedly tried—but largely failed—to win the "hearts and minds" of colonial subjects.

Losing Hearts and Minds explores the loss of British power and prestige in colonial Singapore and Malaya from the First World War to the Malayan Emergency. During this period, British leaders relied on a growing number of Asian, European and Eurasian allies and servicepeople, including servants, police, soldiers, and medical professionals, to maintain their empire. At the same time, British institutions and leaders continued to use racial and gender violence to wage war. As a result, those colonial subjects closest to British power frequently experienced the limits of belonging and the broken promises of imperial inclusion, hastening the end of British rule in Southeast Asia.From the World Wars to the Cold War, European, Indigenous, Chinese, Malay, and Indian civilians resisted or collaborated with British and Commonwealth soldiers, rebellious Indian troops, invading Japanese combatants, and communists. Historian Kate Imy tells the story of how Singapore and Malaya became sites of some of the most impactful military and anti-colonial conflicts of the twentieth century, where British military leaders repeatedly tried—but largely failed—to win the "hearts and minds" of colonial subjects.

Losing Hearts and Minds explores the loss of British power and prestige in colonial Singapore and Malaya from the First World War to the Malayan Emergency. During this period, British leaders relied on a growing number of Asian, European and Eurasian allies and servicepeople, including servants, police, soldiers, and medical professionals, to maintain their empire. At the same time, British institutions and leaders continued to use racial and gender violence to wage war. As a result, those colonial subjects closest to British power frequently experienced the limits of belonging and the broken promises of imperial inclusion, hastening the end of British rule in Southeast Asia.From the World Wars to the Cold War, European, Indigenous, Chinese, Malay, and Indian civilians resisted or collaborated with British and Commonwealth soldiers, rebellious Indian troops, invading Japanese combatants, and communists. Historian Kate Imy tells the story of how Singapore and Malaya became sites of some of the most impactful military and anti-colonial conflicts of the twentieth century, where British military leaders repeatedly tried—but largely failed—to win the "hearts and minds" of colonial subjects.

From the outset of the twentieth century, Egyptian and Indian leaders understood their movements for self-determination as linked and part of a shared project. Following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia proliferated, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces how anticolonial nationalism gained momentum across the East and documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges, and shifting political alliances that came to animate the interwar project of Easternism: a cosmopolitan vision of the world whose center of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo. Erin O'Halloran offers a compelling new account of the era immediately preceding decolonization and the epochal partitions of India and Palestine. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Saad Zaghlul, she introduces less familiar but no less intriguing personalities: feminists, diplomats, and poets; surrealists, socialists and spies. Each dreamed, wrote, organized and fought for the liberation of the East—a space universally evoked, though seemingly impossible to pin down. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Arab, British, and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the rise of anticolonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.

From the outset of the twentieth century, Egyptian and Indian leaders understood their movements for self-determination as linked and part of a shared project. Following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia proliferated, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces how anticolonial nationalism gained momentum across the East and documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges, and shifting political alliances that came to animate the interwar project of Easternism: a cosmopolitan vision of the world whose center of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo. Erin O'Halloran offers a compelling new account of the era immediately preceding decolonization and the epochal partitions of India and Palestine. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Saad Zaghlul, she introduces less familiar but no less intriguing personalities: feminists, diplomats, and poets; surrealists, socialists and spies. Each dreamed, wrote, organized and fought for the liberation of the East—a space universally evoked, though seemingly impossible to pin down. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Arab, British, and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the rise of anticolonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.

From the outset of the twentieth century, Egyptian and Indian leaders understood their movements for self-determination as linked and part of a shared project. Following World War I, as connections between the Middle East and South Asia proliferated, Egypt and India lay squarely at the heart of increasingly complex and multilateral relations. East of Empire traces how anticolonial nationalism gained momentum across the East and documents the friendships, rivalries, cultural exchanges, and shifting political alliances that came to animate the interwar project of Easternism: a cosmopolitan vision of the world whose center of gravity lay beyond Europe, in the great city of Cairo. Erin O'Halloran offers a compelling new account of the era immediately preceding decolonization and the epochal partitions of India and Palestine. Alongside well-known figures like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Saad Zaghlul, she introduces less familiar but no less intriguing personalities: feminists, diplomats, and poets; surrealists, socialists and spies. Each dreamed, wrote, organized and fought for the liberation of the East—a space universally evoked, though seemingly impossible to pin down. Drawing on a broad cross-section of Indian, Arab, British, and European sources, East of Empire transcends archival partitions to tell a powerful and nearly forgotten set of stories about the rise of anticolonial nationalism and the end of empire across the Middle East and South Asia.

This book offers a rich and innovative study of multiracial social worlds in early-twentieth-century London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong – three port cities linked by their importance to global British shipping networks and circuits of Chinese migration. In these cities, Chinese, Black, South Asian and European people came together to foster multiracial communities which have been largely forgotten, remembered only through sensationalist fictions that reflected white anxieties about racial mixing. Nadine Attewell considers these vibrant multiracial worlds through the eyes of those who knew them best: people of mixed Chinese descent, for whom interracial intimacies were features of everyday life.Mobilizing a wide range of archival materials, including photographs, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, Attewell reconstructs the social experiences of people like Vera Leung, a working-class woman of Irish and Chinese descent growing up in Liverpool's interwar Chinatown, and Percy Chang, a Jamaican man of Chinese and African descent with a wide social network in Hong Kong. Rather than centering identity as the focus of mixed-race people's struggles, she asks what they did and with whom. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship and integrating British, Asian, and diasporic histories, Attewell presents new ways of thinking about the everyday meanings of interracial intimacy, and practices of relation and survival under global conditions of colonial capitalist rule.

This book offers a rich and innovative study of multiracial social worlds in early-twentieth-century London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong – three port cities linked by their importance to global British shipping networks and circuits of Chinese migration. In these cities, Chinese, Black, South Asian and European people came together to foster multiracial communities which have been largely forgotten, remembered only through sensationalist fictions that reflected white anxieties about racial mixing. Nadine Attewell considers these vibrant multiracial worlds through the eyes of those who knew them best: people of mixed Chinese descent, for whom interracial intimacies were features of everyday life.Mobilizing a wide range of archival materials, including photographs, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, Attewell reconstructs the social experiences of people like Vera Leung, a working-class woman of Irish and Chinese descent growing up in Liverpool's interwar Chinatown, and Percy Chang, a Jamaican man of Chinese and African descent with a wide social network in Hong Kong. Rather than centering identity as the focus of mixed-race people's struggles, she asks what they did and with whom. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship and integrating British, Asian, and diasporic histories, Attewell presents new ways of thinking about the everyday meanings of interracial intimacy, and practices of relation and survival under global conditions of colonial capitalist rule.

Immediate and visceral, the sense of smell shapes how we experience the world—and ideas about smell are equally powerful. In this innovative study, Jessica P. Clark follows the olfactory sense to trace the entangled histories of nationalism, identity, and difference in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Exploring the cultural and ideological dimensions of scent during a period of transformation across the British world, she charts how privileged groups used smell to stake claims to a white, English identity rooted in a nostalgic rural past—often to the exclusion of the urban poor and racialized groups. Drawing on a wide range of sources including press coverage, medical texts, public health reports, perfumery firm records, and wartime memoirs, Clark analyzes historical descriptions of smells, from raw sewage to lavender. She demonstrates how claims about naturalized 'English' scents and 'alien' odors such as environmental pollutants, cooking smells, and body odor gained traction among public health officials, politicians, and the public, and played a crucial role in the development of racial and ethnic classifications. As she charts the circulation of these ideas, she also traces their effects on people's lived experiences, from impoverished children to imprisoned suffragists to soldiers stationed on the Western Front. Connecting sensory studies with histories of nationalism, and offering new perspectives on urbanization, public health, and the Great War, this book reveals the ideas and anxieties embedded in scent.

In an innovative exploration of how everyday activities can shape an empire, this book uses leisure, spare time, and social life as a new lens through which to view the construction and maintenance of imperial power in British India. Foregrounding the daily lives of the colonial military, Erica Wald argues that many seemingly trivial social interactions were, in fact, central to the construction, negotiation, and understanding of colonial hierarchies. Through the pastimes of empire's servants, from Indian sepoys attending wrestling matches to British officers on pigsticking hunts, Wald reveals the relationship between leisure and power in the daily operation of empire.Drawing on a wide range of archival materials—including official records, letters, diaries, and scrapbooks—Wald traces experiences of leisure among elite soldiers and lower ranks, across mess halls, social clubs, and theaters. She shows how leisure activities operated as means of projecting rank, status, and martial masculinity; as informal mechanisms of colonial control and racial boundary-making; and as a paradigm through which the experience of empire was digested and justified. Considering the tensions around notions of 'respectable' activities, she shows how leisure could also surprise and subvert colonial structures. Bridging military, social, cultural, and anthropocene histories of British India in a compelling new framework, this book shows how the empire itself evolved through everyday social transformations.

In an innovative exploration of how everyday activities can shape an empire, this book uses leisure, spare time, and social life as a new lens through which to view the construction and maintenance of imperial power in British India. Foregrounding the daily lives of the colonial military, Erica Wald argues that many seemingly trivial social interactions were, in fact, central to the construction, negotiation, and understanding of colonial hierarchies. Through the pastimes of empire's servants, from Indian sepoys attending wrestling matches to British officers on pigsticking hunts, Wald reveals the relationship between leisure and power in the daily operation of empire.Drawing on a wide range of archival materials—including official records, letters, diaries, and scrapbooks—Wald traces experiences of leisure among elite soldiers and lower ranks, across mess halls, social clubs, and theaters. She shows how leisure activities operated as means of projecting rank, status, and martial masculinity; as informal mechanisms of colonial control and racial boundary-making; and as a paradigm through which the experience of empire was digested and justified. Considering the tensions around notions of 'respectable' activities, she shows how leisure could also surprise and subvert colonial structures. Bridging military, social, cultural, and anthropocene histories of British India in a compelling new framework, this book shows how the empire itself evolved through everyday social transformations.