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"Colonial Office"
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Governors, Politics and the Colonial Office
This book explores the making of public policy for Hong Kong between 1918 and 1958. During much of this period, the Hong Kong government had limited policymaking capabilities. Many new policies followed initiatives either from the Colonial Office or from politicians in Hong Kong. This book examines the balance of political power influencing how such decisions were reached and who wielded the most influence—the Hong Kong or British governments or the politicians. Gradually, the Hong Kong government, through implementing new policies, improved its own policy-making capabilities and gained the ability to exercise greater autonomy.
eBook
Projecting citizenship : photography and belonging in the British Empire
\"Examines the relationship between photography and citizenship, through a comprehensive account of the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee's lantern slide lecture scheme: a project initiated by the British government at the beginning of the twentieth century that aimed to photograph the entirety of the empire\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Projecting citizenship : photography and belonging in the British Empire
In Projecting Citizenship , Gabrielle Moser gives a comprehensive account of an unusual project produced by the British government’s Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee at the beginning of the twentieth century—a series of lantern slide lectures that combined geography education and photography to teach schoolchildren around the world what it meant to look and to feel like an imperial citizen.
Through detailed archival research and close readings, Moser elucidates the impact of this vast collection of photographs documenting the land and peoples of the British Empire, circulated between 1902 and 1945 in classrooms from Canada to Hong Kong, from the West Indies to Australia. Moser argues that these photographs played a central role in the invention and representation of imperial citizenship. She shows how citizenship became a photographable and teachable subject by tracing the intended readings of the images that the committee hoped to impart to viewers and analyzing how spectators may have used their encounters with these photographs for protest and resistance. Moser shows how the Visual Instruction Committee pictured citizenship within an everyday context and decenters the preoccupation with trauma, violence, atrocity, and conflict that characterizes much of the theoretical literature on visual citizenship and demonstrates that the relationship between photography and citizenship emerged not in the dismantling of modern colonialism but in its consolidation.
Interweaving political and economic history, history of pedagogy, and theories of citizenship with a consideration of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of viewing the lectures, Projecting Citizenship offers important insights into the social inequalities and visual language of colonial rule.
eBook
Revolutions in Sovereignty
How did the world come to be organized into sovereign states? Daniel Philpott argues that two historical revolutions in ideas are responsible. First, the Protestant Reformation ended medieval Christendom and brought a system of sovereign states in Europe, culminating at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Second, ideas of equality and colonial nationalism brought a sweeping end to colonial empires around 1960, spreading the sovereign states system to the rest of the globe. In both cases, revolutions in ideas about legitimate political authority profoundly altered the \"constitution\" that establishes basic authority in the international system.
Ideas exercised influence first by shaping popular identities, then by exercising social power upon the elites who could bring about new international constitutions. Swaths of early modern Europeans, for instance, arrived at Protestant beliefs, then fought against the temporal powers of the Church on behalf of the sovereignty of secular princes, who could overthrow the formidable remains of a unified medieval Christendom. In the second revolution, colonial nationalists, domestic opponents of empire, and rival superpowers pressured European cabinets to relinquish their colonies in the name of equality and nationalism, resulting in a global system of sovereign states. Bringing new theoretical and historical depth to the study of international relations, Philpott demonstrates that while shifts in military, economic, and other forms of material power cannot be overlooked, only ideas can explain how the world came to be organized into a system of sovereign states.
eBook
No man’s land
From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guestworker programs to manage migration. These temporary labor recruitment systems represented a state-brokered compromise between employers who wanted foreign workers and those who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guestworker programs created an especially vulnerable class of labor.
Based on a vast array of sources from U.S., Jamaican, and English archives, as well as interviews,No Man's Landtells the history of the American \"H2\" program, the world's second oldest guestworker program. Since World War II, the H2 program has brought hundreds of thousands of mostly Jamaican men to the United States to do some of the nation's dirtiest and most dangerous farmwork for some of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, companies that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neither by their home government nor by the United States. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little impact because they could be repatriated and replaced in a matter of hours.
No Man's Landputs Jamaican guestworkers' experiences in the context of the global history of this fast-growing and perilous form of labor migration.
eBook
Social Prestige, Agency, and Criminality: Economic Depression and Currency Counterfeiting in Inter-War British West Africa
Drawing on a large collection of official statistics and case studies across colonial boundaries, this paper analyzes the context and incidence of currency counterfeiting in inter-war British West Africa. It examines the phenomenon in the interlocking contexts of the inter-war economic depression, colonial monetary policy, imperial-colonial relations, transnational criminality, international policing and justice systems, the travails of indigenous entrepreneurship, and the driving forces of social prestige and agency. A key feature was the widespread involvement of African merchants who had fallen on hard times occasioned by the Great Depression. The loss of social status in the face of business bankruptcy underlay recourse to currency counterfeiting as an exit strategy. In spite of the limited success of counterfeiting schemes and the small amount of counterfeits in circulation, the coordinated countermeasures of colonial and imperial governments reveal the extent to which counterfeiting was considered a menace to West African currency and economic systems.
Journal Article
Projecting Citizenship
In Projecting Citizenship , Gabrielle Moser gives a
comprehensive account of an unusual project produced by the British
government's Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee at the
beginning of the twentieth century-a series of lantern slide
lectures that combined geography education and photography to teach
schoolchildren around the world what it meant to look and to feel
like an imperial citizen.
Through detailed archival research and close readings, Moser
elucidates the impact of this vast collection of photographs
documenting the land and peoples of the British Empire, circulated
between 1902 and 1945 in classrooms from Canada to Hong Kong, from
the West Indies to Australia. Moser argues that these photographs
played a central role in the invention and representation of
imperial citizenship. She shows how citizenship became a
photographable and teachable subject by tracing the intended
readings of the images that the committee hoped to impart to
viewers and analyzing how spectators may have used their encounters
with these photographs for protest and resistance.
Interweaving political and economic history, history of
pedagogy, and theories of citizenship with a consideration of the
aesthetic and affective dimensions of viewing the lectures,
Projecting Citizenship offers important insights into the
social inequalities and visual language of colonial rule.
eBook
The Research Council System and the Politics of Medical and Agricultural Research for the British Colonial Empire, 1940–52
Historical accounts of colonial science and medicine have failed to engage with the Colonial Office’s shift in focus towards the support of research after 1940. A large new fund was created in 1940 to expand activities in the colonies described as fundamental research. With this new funding came a qualitative shift in the type of personnel and activity sought for colonial development and, as a result, a diverse group of medical and technical officers existed in Britain’s colonies by the 1950s. The fact that such variety existed amongst British officers in terms of their qualifications, institutional locations and also their relationships with colonial and metropolitan governments makes the use of the term ‘expert’ in much existing historical scholarship on scientific and medical aspects of empire problematic. This article will consider how the Colonial Office achieved this expansion of research activities and personnel after 1940. Specifically, it will focus on the reasons officials sought to engage individuals drawn from the British research councils to administer this work and the consequences of their involvement for the new apparatus established for colonial research after 1940. An understanding of the implications of the application of the research council system to the Colonial Empire requires engagement with the ideology promoted by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) and Medical Research Council (MRC) which placed emphasis on the distinct and higher status of fundamental research and which privileged freedom for researchers.
Journal Article
‘Fight TB with BCG’: Mass Vaccination Campaigns in the British Caribbean, 1951–6
Based on a wide range of primary materials, including WHO reports and Colonial Office correspondence, this article examines the UNICEF/WHO-funded mass BCG campaigns that were carried out in seven Caribbean colonies between 1951 and 1956. It explores the reasons behind them, their nature and aftermath and also compares them to those in other non-European countries and discusses them within a context of decolonisation. In doing so, it not only adds to the scholarship on TB in non-European contexts, which had tended to focus on Africa and Asia, but also to the relatively new field of Caribbean medical history and the rapidly expanding body of work on international health, which has paid scant attention to the Anglophone Caribbean and the pre-independence period.
Journal Article