This thesis will examine the portrayal and reception of ‘novel’ technology as constructed spectacle in the military and popular coverage of the Abyssinian (1868) and Ashanti (1873-4) expeditions. It will be argued that new and ‘novel’ military technologies, such as the machine g…
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This thesis studies the reportage in the English language press, primarily in Calcutta (but also covering Burma and Britain) of the Second and Third Anglo-Burmese Wars of 1852 and 1885, respectively. The wars were overwhelmingly the result of a combination of aggressive mercanti…
This thesis explores the construction and use of the hijra figure in fictional literature. It argues that hijras are utilised as both symbols of deviance and central points around which wider anti-sociality circulates. In order to contextualise these characters and offer a deepe…
The First World War allowed for two sources of Pan-Islamism to mature in East Africa: the German Empire and East Africans and the African diaspora. The former had an incentive to develop Pan-Islamism as an element of the 'special feature' policy they were employing to assist in …
Schools, and education more broadly, were pivotal in constructing and maintaining racial difference in the settler colonies of Western Australia and Natal, South Africa. Education must be taken seriously as a way into understanding the intersections between the conflicting, but …
Imperial powers have employed a range of strategies to establish and then maintain control over foreign territories and communities. As deploying military forces from the home country is often costly – not to mention logistically stretching when long distances are involved – man…
This thesis examines and contextualises historically significant aspects of the ways in which David Roberts’ lucrative lithographic publication Egypt and Nubia (1846-49) represented the “Orient”. The analysis demonstrates that Roberts used tropes, particularly ruins and disposse…
Empire is not a supreme entity controlling high-level policies in metropolises: it is a reality translated into the daily lives of the subalterns at the periphery of the periphery of empire, as this microhistory of Qina province during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries arg…
This study is an attempt to ascertain the degree to which occupied and occupier can truly understand each other. The focus is Egypt between 1882 and 1919. This work attempts to ascertain how a whole host of Egyptians of various outlooks perceived the British Empire that had rece…
This study is designed to examine the transformations of collective identities in twentieth-century Eritrea in the context of the Italian, British, and Ethiopian empires. Avoiding partisan representations, which see nationalists in the vanguard of emancipatory politics, and impe…
This dissertation explores the emergence of three different epidemic diseases in three British colonial cities at the end of the nineteenth century. At first glance these cities – Melbourne, Australia; Bombay, India; and Belfast, Northern Ireland – appear disparate, and their ep…
With the prosecution for obscenity of the British publisher Henry Vizetelly in 1888 for publishing English translations of several of the novels of Emile Zola, the British government initiated what might be termed a ‘moral crusade’ to control the reading matter of its colonial s…
From the moment the first reports of violence arrived in London, the Indian Rebellion of 1857 has been used as a backdrop on which politicians, religious leaders, philosophers, rebels, and historians have projected their own views on issues ranging from imperial administration t…
This dissertation studies the role of water in colonial statecraft in late-colonial Kenya. While the economic and political basis of colonial development after World War Two has been fully established, much of the work looking at the implementation of these projects focuses on l…
At the start of the twentieth century, British intelligence agents began seriously to venture to the region they called “Arabia,” drawn by both geopolitical concerns and the hope of finding in a proverbially mystical land the spiritual calm that eluded them at home. These compet…
In describing the experience of British Empire soldiers in the First World War, most scholars have focused only on the Western Front, ignoring the most important secondary theaters of Britain's war: the Sinai and Palestine. In these campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, there ca…
This study examines the relationship of Winston Churchill to the British Empire in the broadest terms. It demonstrates by reference to Churchill's writings and actions that empire was not a sidelight of Churchill's life and thought, but rather formed a keystone for the understan…
During the interwar period, the British insisted that agricultural and technical education were best suited for Africans, preparing them for a life of rural sustenance. However, Africans demanded better and higher education from their imperial rulers or, in the best case, a comp…
Within the greater historiography of European led African colonial militaries, the history of the Gambia Company of the West African Frontier Force is largely unknown. The Gambia Company initially formed in 1902 from a nucleus of Sierra Leoneans. It continued to rely on Sierra L…