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This article focuses on the genealogy of the Mackintosh archive, showing how subjects are interpellated through archival networks that span imperial and metropolitan sites, linking people, ideas, knowledge and material resources. By tracing the Mackintosh archive across generations of family members embedded in British imperial society, it shows how archives call forth an individual—Sir James Mackintosh—as a symbol and a site of the interconnections between the patriarchal family, the male-dominated state and the production of cultural imaginaries of belonging. Tracing this archive, it argues that the ‘society’ to which James Mackintosh belonged is both reflected in, and constituted through, the letters and journals that comprise his archive. In form and content, they provide the material evidence for the interconnectedness of social, familial, intellectual and political lives. They function both as fantasies and representations of belonging to a social network—a community—and a constitutive part of the consolidation of that network. The letters and diaries that comprise the Mackintosh Archive bear witness to the formation of a literary elite at the turn of the nineteenth century and the mobility of that elite around European-imperial space. Thus, the Mackintosh Archive illustrates the point, made by an increasing number of imperial and global historians, that ideas and identities were forged through inter-connections across space.

The city of George Town, Penang has always been enmeshed in complex circulations of trade, people, and ideas. By the end of the nineteenth century, George Town developed a multicultural and polyglot society that included a kaleidoscopic mix of ethnic groups. This article investigates the role played by George Town’s cosmopolitan population in developing the port-city into a global hub for commercial, intellectual, and physical interchange. In particular, this article argues that the city’s success depended on intricate webs of personal and professional connections developed by George Town’s residents across Southeast Asia and beyond. It hones in on how one community, the Peranakan Chinese, built and leveraged networks across the British, Dutch, and Japanese Empires. By exploring these intra-and trans-imperial networks, this article makes the case for studying colonial cities like George Town not as passive nodes of empire but as active sites within overlapping imperial networks.

Drawing on a rich trove of documents, including correspondence not seen for 300 years, this study explores the emergence and growth of a remarkable global trade network operated by Armenian silk merchants from a small outpost in the Persian Empire. Based in New Julfa, Isfahan, in what is now Iran, these merchants operated a network of commercial settlements that stretched from London and Amsterdam to Manila and Acapulco. The New Julfan Armenians were the only Eurasian community that was able to operate simultaneously and successfully in all the major empires of the early modern world—both land-based Asian empires and the emerging sea-borne empires—astonishingly without the benefits of an imperial network and state that accompanied and facilitated European mercantile expansion during the same period. This book brings to light for the first time the trans-imperial cosmopolitan world of the New Julfans. Among other topics, it explores the effects of long distance trade on the organization of community life, the ethos of trust and cooperation that existed among merchants, and the importance of information networks and communication in the operation of early modern mercantile communities.

This essay surveys the operations of foreign policy think tanks, and how they have functioned to create transnational knowledge networks, since their emergence in the early twentieth century, around the First World War. It discusses how patterns of linkages among foreign policy think tanks changed and evolved over time, and were linked to broader Anglo-American, imperial, and internationalist networks and relationships, and to the changing international political climate and configuration. It suggests some ways in which think tanks contributed to Cold War interchanges between different states, especially to Soviet bloc–Western relations and Asian–Western relations. It concludes by discussing the recent proliferation and frequent globalization of foreign policy think tanks, and suggests how such trends may develop in future.

This article explores the formation of British imperial identity through a focus on the career of Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), a well-known Whig intellectual and imperial careerist who originally hailed from the Highlands of Scotland. Using Mackintosh's unpublished letters and autobiography, the article shows how he imagined and narrated his relationship to the Scottish Highlands from the vantage points of Bombay and London. In contrast to recent historiography that has focused on the translation of Scottish society, culture, and identity in British imperial spaces, this article argues that disidentification from the Highlands of Scotland and the erasure of different peoples, cultures, and textures of life was integral to Mackintosh's configuration of a British imperial identity.

As a colonial rebellion that fractured complex relationships between Britain and America, as a war that ended or upended the lives of millions, and as the foundation of a new political nation that made novel claims to the basis of its political authority, the American Revolution was not a single event. This chapter discusses the varied experiences of women and the significance of the American Revolution. During the Revolution's early stages (1765–74), those women who were most closely tied to Britain's imperial networks had the greatest impact on the colonial rebellion, as conflicts and protests solidified into political positions. The occupation by Patriot or British forces of diverse areas within the colonies provided other means for women to become actors in the military and political drama. The US government's exploitation of women as it sought to expand geographically after the Revolution is clearest in the Southeast.

When a group of Scottish East India Company soldiers was appointed to create a settlement in the Baramahal and Salem region of the Madras Presidency, their process of arriving at a tax and land settlement, and the settlement itself, were heavily influenced by their imperial networks and understandings of agricultural improvement. However, these were at variance with the culture of the region and local understandings of agriculture, property ownership and economic security. This chapter explores how the altruistic vision of the head collector, Read, was in fact imposed via the coercive power of the East India Company. This was the first incarnation of the ryotwari system, championed by Sir Thomas Munro.

This book examines the role of mercantile networks in linking Asian economies to the global economy. It contains fourteen contributions on East, Southeast and South Asia covering the period from 1750 to the present.

To understand resistance to informal empire we must understand resistance to rationalization. Finding opposing strands to this rationalization is not difficult to do, as long as one does not expect consistency or agreement among the parties concerned. Resistance, if it has a common thread, often opposed the ideals of the Enlightenment and the sweeping changes that these ideals wreaked on traditional society. This is complicated by the fact that the English, Scottish and French thinkers of the Enlightenment do not offer a consistent, let alone always coherent, body of thought. Also many of the strongest critics of the Enlightenment have simultaneously been considered iconic figures of the very same movement, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) with his anti-democratic idea of the ‘general will’ overriding popular vote. In the twentieth century many ‘reactionary’ forces pulled inspiration from the mass politics initiated by the egalitarian French Revolution and merged mass democracy with an atavistic militant and aristocratic tradition.

In 1905 a satirical dialogue entitled The Australian Case Against John Bull was published in Sydney. Its radical author, Edward de Norbury Rogers, described a fictional meeting in a London office between a canny representative of Australia — Dr Commonwealth — and an equally buffoonish John Bull. Dr Commonwealth’s ‘case’ revolved around the havoc wreaked on Australia by its £344 million debt to Bull’s business partner, one Mr Wrathchild. Australians were forced to pay an annual ‘tribute’ of £15.5 million to Wrathchild and Bull, yet (according to figures drawn from Australia’s leading statistician, Timothy Coghlan) only £16 million of capital had reached or remained in the continent. Thus, borrowing had only led to stagnation, poverty, and unemployment. Responsibility for the mess lay with Australia’s ‘commercial interests, the squatters, and upper classes’, who were ‘more or less identified with the money ring’. Interest payments meant that ‘our governments are rapidly being converted into mere taxing machines for the benefit of absentee money-lenders’. As a result, Dr Commonwealth warned: ‘It is justice, not the money tie, which keeps states and Empires together … your partner with his eternal and increasing demand for interest … is setting us against you’. Wrathchild’s avarice was compelling the Australian Labor Party to ‘take the lead in a universal revolt against the power of money’, and, if nothing changed, ‘your wonderful credit machine will be smashed to pieces and your Empire will pass from you’.1