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This paper focuses on Sarojini Naidu's noteworthy 1924 visit to South Africa. She was the first high profile Indian to visit after the departure of Mohandas K. Gandhi in 1914. Her visit also highlighted that Indian political figures' visits to colonies often perpetuated a reliance on India for political redress. Naidu stood out because, even though she came as Gandhi's emissary, she went well beyond him in calling for a broad-based black alliance against white minority rule. She also emphasised that Indians in South Africa were national citizens and owed their allegiance to their adopted home. By emphasising the ‘South Africanness’ of Indians, she put paid to Gandhi's idea of imperial citizenship transcending the nation-state. Moreover, she was highly critical of Empire. The question is whether Naidu's visit should be understood within a particular historical trajectory or as the individual actions of an exceptional woman, feminist, and leader. This paper argues that she reflected changes in attitudes towards race in the colonies as well as feelings in India, including Gandhi's, of disillusionment with Empire. Rather than seeing Naidu's position as that of an outstanding individual, it should be contextualised within a specific historical conjuncture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is by now a truism that anthropology, especially British social anthropology, emerged under the regime of colonialism, and thus, to some extent, bears the imprint of and some responsibility for that oppressive institution. The reality is much more interesting. This paper, by focusing on the role of funding in the success of many intellectual paradigms, traces the source of the pre-eminence of British structural-functionalism not to the colonial system, but rather to an American intellectual tradition that was progressive, reform-minded, and devoted to benefiting oppressed peoples, especially African-Americans and latterly Africans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that both Michael Banton and John Rex were ‘children of empire’, albeit in starkly different ways, and that these differences were at the core of their querulous exchanges over their long careers. The larger issue, however, concerns the impact of colonialism on sociology, especially in its formative years, and conversely, the role of sociology in providing erudite justification for colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers AKEL's (Progressive Party of the Working People) stance on Cyprus's national issue in the era of British colonialism (1922–59). For analytical purposes, the time span is divided into two periods. The first period covers the years 1922–41, the years during which the CPC (Communist Party of Cyprus) was functioning. The second period extends from AKEL's foundation in 1941 to the declaration of Cyprus's independence in 1959. The analytical framework focuses on five parameters that will illuminate the Cypriot communist left's strategies, tactics and responses to the various developments and phases of the national issue of Cyprus in the period under study: the age of the party; the colonial status of Cyprus; external influences; intra-party conflicts; political opposition. It is argued that the national issue precluded presentation of a socialist agenda to the people of Cyprus, but it also helped AKEL reach out for alliances with other political forces and personalities, and gain and retain a prominent role in Cypriot politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes a project consulting 1918-1936 Palestinian archival resources from the British mandatory administration of Palestine in order to explore the development of Palestinian citizenship under the Palestinian Mandate. The author focuses on documents including letters written to the League of Nations and British officials, anti-mandate Palestinian newspaper articles, and papers of populist Palestinian leaders to examine citizenship practices under the Palestinian Mandate.

The Suez Canal played an essential role in transforming the Mediterranean into a colonial sea by changing its geopolitical features from a lake to a lane connecting faraway possessions of European empires more closely (at least geographically speaking) to the metropoles. At the same time the Suez Canal region itself was colonised in a very specific way, under British occupation on the one hand, yet carrying features of a ‘global locality’ on the other. Besides shedding light on the larger connections of the Suez Canal with the colonial world, this article attempts to understand the colonial situation of Port Said and the Canal, a place built from scratch in an effort to colonise (in the primary sense of the word) a part of the desert. Tracing Port Said and the Suez Canal Zone through different time periods – particularly during the First World War and the inter-war era – this paper tries to pin down the shifting meanings of ‘international’ and ‘colonial’ by highlighting the specificities of this ‘international colonisation’, regulated by agreements and treaties and marked by the influence of competing colonial powers and private companies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the amplitude with which Prime Minister W. M. Hughes voiced Australian claims during the First World War, his conduct in the immediate postwar years shows that his nationalism remained consistent with an imperial and British standpoint. This proposition is illustrated with reference to Hughes' role in the 1921 imperial conference, the Chanak crisis, and his post-prime ministerial memoir. While obsessed with expedients to improve the speed and scope of intra-imperial communications and thus facilitate consultation, Hughes was concerned to ensure that Australia played a proper role in arriving at a consensus on the deep common interest that unified Britain and the Dominions. His lack of concern for extending the scope for independent action won by the Dominions during the war, his dismissive remarks regarding the British role in the League of Nations, and the vehemence of his communications with London in 1922, must all be seen within the context of an imperial loyalty that survived the war undiminished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The whole British Empire was involved in the Second World War from its outset. This article challenges the myth of Britain 'alone' against Hitler; one-fifth of the world's population was at war because Britain was. Britain called on vast colonial resources to defend a global empire and global trade. The importance of the African continent has been overlooked, but Africa experienced a large range of military activities by land, sea and air and personnel from all over the Empire served there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on British graduates from Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) in London, this article illustrates transnational history’s concerns with the reciprocal flows of people and ideas within and beyond the British Empire. GHTC’s progressive curriculum and culture positioned women teachers as agents of change, and the article highlights the lives and work of married and single graduates overseas after the Second World War. Some migrated to the dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand, while South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) were popular destinations for short-term teaching contracts. A few graduates went to the colonies as missionaries and colonial servants, and a handful taught in extra-imperial sites. Wherever they were located, these British women promulgated the college’s progressive ideals and shared their experiences with people at home in Britain, thereby shaping understandings of the Empire and constructing a world that was differentiated by class, gender, race and nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The reasons for the British decision to withdraw from the Gulf are highly contentious. While some scholars have focused on short-term considerations, especially the devaluation of sterling towards the end of 1967, in the British determination to quit the Gulf, others have concentrated on longer-term trends in British policy-making for the region. This article sides with the latter. Britain's Gulf role came under increasing scrutiny following the 1956 Suez crisis as part of an ongoing debate about the costs and benefits of Britain's Gulf presence. In this sense, British withdrawal fitted into a wider pattern of British decolonisation. By the 1960s, the Treasury, in particular, strongly questioned the necessity and cost-effectiveness of the maintenance of empire in the Gulf to safeguard British economic interests there. Recent interpretations which seek to disaggregate the British decision to leave Southeast Asia from the decision to depart from the Gulf are also questionable. By mid-1967, it had already been determined that Britain would leave both regions by the mid-1970s, the only difference being that this decision was formally announced with respect to Southeast Asia, but not with regard to the Gulf. The devaluation of sterling in November 1967, therefore, merely hastened and facilitated decisions which had already been taken. Despite the end of formal empire in the Gulf, Britain did seek, not always successfully, to preserve its interests into the 1970s and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores attempts by British colonial officials based in Aden to extend systems of political administration to the colony's tribal hinterland during the late interwar and early wartime period. Commencing initially with delicate attempts to recast faltering relations between tribal chiefs and their subjects, the policy would culminate a decade later with the despatch of British military units throughout the furthest extents of the protectorate in support of a range of direct political agreements with local rulers that would eventually set the conditions for federation. The intervening years featured a series of little-known debates among various officials on how precisely to cement British influence in the tribal areas, and the philosophy of administration to be pursued to that end. These would expose an element of confusion as to which techniques would best satisfy British policy, and reveal a preference on the part of some for the application of methods atypical of those used elsewhere under Colonial Office jurisdiction, and which drew their inspiration instead from systems of control used on India's volatile frontiers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the experiences of teachers who participated in the League of the Empire’s ‘Interchange of Home and Dominion Teachers’ scheme through a tripartite approach to ‘British World’ space. First, it identifies the mechanisms through which exchanges were established. It analyses the patterns of teacher mobility and axes of movement evident in the exchange data from the 1932, predominantly female, teachers who were involved in exchanges between 1919 and 1931. Second, it examines participants’ reflections on their experiences to recover their various conceptions and imaginings of the spaces they traversed. Third, it considers the local aspect of imperial exchange and demonstrates that specific colonial sites played a part in shaping participating teachers’ mobility. Although the framework of multiple, overlapping British worlds is relatively new, this article demonstrates that it has immense value to historians of education in illuminating the complex British, and transnational, space in which educational networks operated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This short article comments on the Symposium inERSvol. 37/10 in which current scholars revisited the bookThe Empire Strikes Backand its legacy. The article comments on the book's assertion that a historical background is necessary to understand the absorption of migrant labour into capitalist societies, and notes the prevailing ignorance of the history of imperialism in UK schools and society. It discusses the current assumptions that if schools teach ‘fundamental British values’, racial and religious conflicts will somehow be minimized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the satirical poem "The Martyr's Return" by Sir Andrew Gourlay Clow of the Indian Civil Service and discusses the history of radio broadcasting in India. Topics discussed include the transition of the Indian State Broadcasting service into All India Radio, the life and career of broadcaster Lionel Fielden, and British colonial government.

This article traces the history of four words: ‘non-racial’, ‘non-racialism’, ‘multi- racial’, and ‘multi-racialism’. Its main concern is to identify when and how these terms developed a role within British colonial and South African political discourse. At the end of the 1950s, the struggles within the anti-apartheid movement became entangled with a broader discussion across southern and eastern Africa regarding democracy, nationalism, and political representation. In clarifying the significance of this moment, this article reconstructs the earlier history of ‘multi- racial democracy’ from its formulation in South African liberal circles in the 1930s to its incorporation into British colonial policy following the Second World War. It then traces the divergent conceptualisations of non-racialism and African nationalism that developed in response to multi-racial democracy. It concludes that African National Congress (ANC) leaders adopted the language of non-racial democracy in a reactive fashion after the 1958 Africanist split in order to clarify the organisation’s position on group rights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses aspects of the book "Unfinished Empire. The Global Expansion of Britain" by John Darwin. Particular focus is given to Darwin's overall attitude towards British history with special attention to the process of decolonization. Other topics addressed include 20th century historiography, the history of Great Britain in the first half of the 20th century, and British imperialism, as well as its colonies.

A stereotypical image of the nation's First World War soldiers—and a conventional understanding of their war experience and its meaning—is not a concept unique to the British Empire's former Pacific Dominions, but is also promulgated in other parts of the Empire. During the First World War and interwar period, Canada also saw the emergence of a ‘Myth of the Soldier’ that paralleled the Anzac legend in many ways. This article focuses on some of the similarities and differences in Australia and Canada's mythologising of their First World War soldiers, proposing that this process reflects aspects of identity formation common to settler societies within the British world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do states configure their citizenship laws in certain ways? Why do they allow or prohibit dual citizenship? Why was it only in 1946 that Canada decided to enact its first citizenship law which prohibited multiple national allegiances? Why was a similar proposal abandoned in 1931? And why was this citizenship law changed in 1977 to allow dual citizenship? A common answer is that citizenship reflects the national “identity” of each nation-state. Through a perusal of the debates regarding citizenship laws in Canada, I locate the particular motivation for introducing those laws. I argue that although the symbolic element of citizenship laws is significant, citizenship laws are enacted as a political instrument to achieve immediate and specific goals. In particular, accepting dual citizenship in Canada should be seen as a one of the strategies political elites tried in order to incorporate English and French speakers under the same flag. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1912, two women and 26 men comprised the Australasian team at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the following years during World War I, 77% of the male members of the team volunteered to serve the British Empire. Four made the supreme sacrifice, one of whom was the great, highly respected swimmer Cecil Healy. Many were wounded and a sizeable number were highly decorated for their war service. This article examines the contribution of the 1912 Australasian Olympians to the Great War, and the participation of a number in the post-hostilities Inter-Allied sporting competitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the historical legacy of contemporary development alliances through an analysis of the British government’s Empire Marketing Board poster campaign from 1926 to 1933. The primary aim of these posters was to instil in the British public a preference for buying empire-grown goods and the significance of their role as consumers in maintaining the Empire. By conveying messages of a common humanity and invoking a visual language of interdependence between Britain and its colonies, the posters attempted to open up new connections and create new moral communities across distance in ways that are not dissimilar to fair trade campaigns today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1923 deportation of two Irish republican envoys was a signal moment in the construction of Australian immigration policy, remembered more in legal than political history. The arrival of the Irish envoys, anti-treaty, anti-Free State and anti-British, provoked anxieties about imperial loyalty and domestic harmony. This article contextualises the role of the envoys as a performance of Irish republican politics in the dying stages of the Irish Civil War before analysing the responses to them by Australian governments determined to curb their activities. Immigration policy and administration were constructed in this episode as an element of national security, one that implied a consideration for relations between states of a changing empire as well as the need for domestic harmony within Australian borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Zealand's participation in the League of Nations in the 1920s and early 1930s was greatly influenced by the issue of money. Though an original member, New Zealand regarded the League as a distraction at best and at worst a threat to the British Empire. Unsympathetic conservative governments begrudged the cost of membership, in both representation and dues. Obliged to send delegations to the annual League Assemblies, New Zealand governments handicapped their delegates by refusing to give them the resources to represent their country adequately. However, once at Geneva, the dominion's delegates led campaigns to control the League's budget with the aim of reducing the amount the members had to pay as annual contributions. Ironically, New Zealand's determination to keep its distance from Geneva led to its obsession with the League's finances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a historical overview of British government-run filmmaking in the colony of Hong Kong during the 1930s and 1940s. Particular focus is given to the struggle between the Colonial Office (CO) of the British Colonial Film Unit (CFU) and the documentary film movement in Great Britain known as Griersonian tradition, after the filmmaker John Grierson. Additional topics include World War II propaganda films produced by the CFU and the British Ministry of Information (MoI) to promote British aims in its colonies during the conflict and differences in film production in large and small British colonies.

In 1945, the established British imperial communications system, based on the Cable and Wireless network, was re-structured. The imperial partners agreed to break up the hitherto integrated system and re-establish it as an interconnecting network of networks based on separate, nationalised, entities. Co-ordination began to shift from a consensual system to one based on prices and the hitherto largely self-contained system began to interconnect with other global telecommunication networks, notably those of the USA. John, Lord Reith played an important role in these transformations and his January 1945 “Mission” to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia epitomises both the mutuality and the London dominance that characterised the imperial system and which were to fall away following the Commonwealth Telecommunications Conference held in London in mid 1945. Reith’s Mission exemplified the swan song of a distinctive manner of imperial governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With a steady release of material into The National Archives (UK), scholarly interest in imperial and commonwealth history as well as the field of intelligence studies has grown. The Malayan Emergency continues to provide a wealth of material, particularly for those interested in counter-insurgency. Yet the colonial police, and by extension their intelligence branches, have received less attention. This article considers new evidence of the organizational changes that occurred and the discussions that took place between the Colonial Office, the Malayan Government, the Malayan Police and the wider intelligence community which led to a restructuring of the Malayan Police and its Special Branch. It charts the rise of the Malayan Police Special Branch during the early stages of the emergency and its disentanglement from CID, reflecting on how police reform was shaped as much by external agencies as by local considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years before and during the Second World War, the Roosevelt Administration played an important and often overlooked role in encouraging Britain's disengagement from the Indian subcontinent. Roosevelt's motivations in pressing for Indian independence were varied. They included a mix of principled opposition to colonialism, practical concern for the outcome of the war and pragmatic jockeying for influence with post-colonial nations when the war was won. Churchill's government was wary of being pushed by Washington to move more quickly to 'quit India' than it thought prudent. U.S. policy and actions clearly influenced the direction of events toward independence, but U.S. caution as the war ground on led to disillusionment among nationalist leaders. This reaction would have consequences once swaraj was won and India came into its own, at a time when the Cold War was becoming the dominant factor in America's view of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain attempted to create an informal empire in the Middle East and used the British Middle East Office to sponsor development work precisely to attain a significant influence in the region, one that would salvage a fair share of rapidly declining imperial power. Environmental initiatives, many of them focusing on forestry, composed a key element of this programme. However an informal empire did not ensue. This led the Foreign Office, and many historians, to overlook the importance of the BMEO. This article explores how the environmental reforms proposed by British advisers radically changed land use in the Middle East between 1946 and 1970, and left behind a remarkable legacy of conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article calls into question the conventional narrative about international meddling in British Guiana, which argues that US intervention against the Leftist government of Premier Cheddi Jagan was the proximate cause for the colony's racial violence as it moved to independence. The authors focus on the violent pro-government sugar workers' strike of 1964 and in particular the role of Jagan's wife, Janet, presenting evidence from retired Cuban intelligence agents that Cuba countered US aid to the opposition by providing paramilitary training to Guianese cadres and laundering financial aid to Jagan's government. This outside intervention turned British Guiana into a Cold War sideshow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the history of the Commonwealth countries between 1929 and 2009. The author discusses the changing character of government in the Commonwealth by contrasting the four governments ruling those countries in 1944 with the 12 governments established by 1957. The process of decolonization and the establishment of postcolonial governments in Commonwealth Countries is described. Relations between India and Great Britain during the decolonization period is addressed. Political issues faced by the Commonwealth Countries including the organization's treatment of apartheid in South Africa are noted.