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In the two decades before World War One, Great Britain witnessed the largest revival of anti-slavery protest since the legendary age of emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than campaigning against the trans-Atlantic slave trade, these latter-day abolitionists focused on the so-called 'new slaveries' of European imperialism in Africa, condemning coercive systems of labor taxation and indentured servitude, as well as evidence of atrocities. A Civilized Savagery illuminates the multifaceted nature of British humanitarianism by juxtaposing campaigns against different forms of imperial labor exploitation in three separate areas: the Congo Free State, South Africa, and Portuguese West Africa. In doing so, Kevin Grant points out how this new type of humanitarianism influenced the transition from Empire to international government and the advent of universal human rights in subsequent decades.

In putting extraterritoriality into practice in the treaty ports, the British state did not simply withdraw rights from the Chinese state; it inhabited the space made by extraterritoriality by building institutions and engaging in practices which had consequences for the development of the treaty ports, and which need to be at the forefront of any attempt to understand colonialism in China. Through a focus both on the creation of law and institutions, and also on the management of British ‘problem populations’ – violent Europeans and ‘martial’ Indians – this book provides a revision of the history of empire and colonialism in China, explaining important features which have to date been glossed over in studies of other aspects of treaty port colonialism. Colonialism in China casts a long shadow, but key aspects of the British state’s central role in this history have before now been little understood.

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.

A panoramic, provocative account of the clash between British imperialism and Arab jihadism in Africa between 1870 and 1920 The Ottoman Sultan called for a \"Great Jihad\" against the Entente powers at the start of the First World War. He was building on half a century of conflict between British colonialism and the people of the Middle East and North Africa. Resistance to Western violence increasingly took the form of radical Islamic insurgency.   Ranging from the forests of Central Africa to the deserts of Egypt, Sudan, and Somaliland, Neil Faulkner explores a fatal collision between two forms of oppression, one rooted in the ancient slave trade, the other in modern \"coolie\" capitalism. He reveals the complex interactions between anti-slavery humanitarianism, British hostility to embryonic Arab nationalism, \"war on terror\" moral panics, and Islamist revolt. Far from being an enduring remnant of the medieval past, or an essential expression of Muslim identity, Faulkner argues that \"Holy War\" was a reactionary response to the violence of modern imperialism.

In 1806 General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, was brought to trial for the torture of a free mulatto named Louisa Calderon and for overseeing a regime of terror over the island's slave population. James Epstein offers a fascinating account of the unfolding of this colonial drama. He shows the ways in which the trial and its investigation brought empire 'home' and exposed the disjuncture between a national self-image of humane governance and the brutal realities of colonial rule. He uses the trial to open up a range of issues, including colonial violence and norms of justice, the status of the British subject, imperial careering, visions of development after slavery, slave conspiracy and the colonial archive. He reveals how Britain's imperial regime became more authoritarian, hierarchical and militarised but also how unease about abuses of power and of the rights of colonial subjects began to grow.

Throughout the British colonies in the nineteenth century, judges were expected not only to administer law and justice, but also to play a significant role within the governance of their jurisdictions. British authorities were consequently concerned about judges' loyalty to the Crown, and on occasion removed or suspended those who were found politically subversive or personally difficult. Even reasonable and well balanced judges were sometimes threatened with removal. Using the career histories of judges who challenged the system, Dewigged, Bothered, and Bewildered illuminates issues of judicial tenure, accountability, and independence throughout the British Empire. John McLaren closely examines cases of judges across a wide geographic spectrum — from Australia to the Caribbean, and from Canada to Sierra Leone — who faced disciplinary action. These riveting stories provide helpful insights into the tenuous position of the colonial judiciary and the precarious state of politics in a variety of British colonies.

Throughout the nineteenth century the British Empire was the subject of much writing; floods of articles, books and government reports were produced about the areas under British control and the policy of imperialism. Mid-Victorian Imperialists investigates how the Victorians made sense of all the information regarding the empire by examining the writings of a collection of gentlemen who were amongst the first people to join the Colonial Society in 1868-69. These men included imperial officials, leading settlers, British politicians and writers, and Beasley looks at the common trends in their beliefs about the British Empire and how their thoughts changed during their lives to show how Mid-Victorian theories of racial, cultural and political classification arose. Edward Beasley is a Lecturer in History at San Diego State University, where he also teaches in the Liberal Studies Program. He is the author of Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868 (Routledge 2004).

Examining the rise of the field of imperial history in Britain and wider webs of advocacy, this book demonstrates how intellectuals and politicians promoted settler colonialism, excluded the subject empire, and laid a precarious framework for decolonization.History was politics in late-nineteenth-century Britain.

Laws that were imposed by colonizers were as much an attempt to confirm their own identity as to control the more dangerous elements of a potentially unruly populace. This title uses material from both British Parliamentary Papers and colonial archive material to provide evidence of legal change and response.

The British prohibition of sati (the funeral practice of widow immolation) in 1829 has been considered an archetypal example of colonial social reform. It was not the end of the story, however, as between 1830 and 1860, British East India Company officials engaged in a debate with the Indian rulers of the Rajput and Maratha princely states of North West India about the pro- hibition and suppression of sati in their territories. This book examines the debates that brought about legislation in these areas, arguing that they were instrumental in setting the terms of post-colonial debates about sati and, more generally, in defining the parameters of British involvement in Indian social and religious issues. This book provides a reinterpretation of the major themes of sovereignty, authority and social reform in colonial South Asian history by examining the shifting pragmatic, political, moral and ideological forces which underpinned British policies on and attitudes to sati. The author illuminates the complex ways in which East India Company officials negotiated the limits of their own authority in India, their conceptions of the nature and extent of Indian princely sovereignty, and argues that the so-called ‘civilising mission’ was often dependent on local circumstances and political expediencies rather than overarching imperial principles; the book also evaluates Indian responses to the supposed modernising Enlightenment discourse. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of South Asian history as well as British colonial studies.