"This book focuses on the ways in which the British settler colonies of Australia, Canada. New Zealand and South Africa treated indigenous peoples in relation to political rights, commencing with the imperial policies of the 1830s and ending with the national political settlemen…
At the height of the 'Great Game' in Central Asia, in the aftermath of the second Afghan War and in the run up to World War I, the region of Afghanistan became particularly significant for both Great Britain and Russia. In Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire, Christopher M. Wy…
In 1953, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson shook the foundations of imperial history with their essay 'The Imperialism of Free Trade'. They reshaped how historians saw the British empire, focussing not on the 'red bits on the map' and the wishes of policy makers in London, but …
Canada in the Frame
Canada in the Frame explores a photographic collection held at the British Library that offers a unique view of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Canada. The collection, which contains in excess of 4,500 images, taken between 1895 and 1923, covers a dynamic per…
Within this new age of digital everything, scholarly work has been greatly changed due to information access, new media, and computational abilities that far exceed that of the human mind. This change in research and dissemination practices has impacted every field of study, but…
While there is no shortage of scholarship on the downstream effects of colonialism, colonial authoritarianism itself remains seriously understudied. This dissertation develops mid-range insights about the “colonial situation” through a three-part exploration of the roles played …
This dissertation examines the ways in which Catholics in the seventeenth-century British Atlantic balanced their competing identities as English, Scottish and Irish subjects and Catholics, despite persecution for their religion. It traces the stories of four groups of Catholics…
This work focuses on the case of a single French slave-trading ship intercepted by the British Navy in the early 1830s off the coast of Sierra Leone, utilizing this case study to examine the broader themes of abolition, emancipation, labor, and identity in the context of early n…
Arms proliferation, following the First World War, presented tremendous problems for British-colonial governance in the Middle East. Specifically, the Iraqi revolt of 1920 against British occupation illustrated a larger problem: how can the imperial government halt arms transfer…
The American Revolution not only marked the end of Britain’s control over thirteen rebellious colonies, but also the beginning of a division among subsequent historians that has long shaped our understanding of British America. Some historians have emphasized a continental appro…
In contrast to previous scholarship, which emphasizes the passing of the union in the period after 1798 or understands the union as an outcome of long-term British politically integrative tendency, this dissertation argues that the British-Irish union of 1801 had economic founda…
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…
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…
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…
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 …