By studying and closely examining the actions of John James Barnard in Chile, we can understand his complex relationship with the Chilean government and society. His close association with Bernardo O'Higgins, his many involvements as an advisor within the government and its different roles with many government-created entities, his role as a merchant and as representative of them, and his role as an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society show us a very complex and dynamic character that developed in the early stages of Chilean independence. Throughout the life and many roles of John James Barnard, it is possible to review and understand the intricate relationship between Chile and Great Britain and how that relationship shaped the country during the post-independence era. The participation of certain actors - like John James Barnard - was crucial in strengthening some beneficial policies for the British merchants, encouraging the steady influx of hundreds of traders into Chile through the 1820s.
This article examines the role of letters to the editor in British newspapers as a medium for settlers in self-governing British colonies to perform imperial citizenship during the late nineteenth century. Analyzing a dataset of 125 letters from 1860-1900, it highlights how settlers used the participatory nature of the British press to navigate the economic, military, and political structures that remained under British influence after colonial self-governance. By leveraging British public opinion through these letters, settlers sought to address obstacles such as local governmental inefficiencies, unfavorable portrayals in the British press, and challenges from imperial policies and corporate power. The article problematizes historiographical distinctions between political and cultural imperial citizenship. It reveals the persistence of British influence in settler colonies through the guise of public opinion. It emphasizes the constraints imposed by class and editorial gatekeeping on who was afforded the opportunity to perform imperial citizenship through the participatory press. And it argues that letters to the editor were not only tools of individual agency but also windows into the complex and interwoven cacophony of lived experiences of empire within the late nineteenth-century settler colonies.
This article examines the intellectual landscape of the late Cold War and early post-Cold War years. It argues that this era was more intellectually diverse than is often remembered, and that a transatlantic exchange took place between British and American intellectuals which helped to shape the leading narratives of the nineties. Challenging the retrospective focus on triumphalist predictions such as Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History,' it situates this thesis alongside competing frameworks which offered more pessimistic or pragmatic visions of the post-Cold War world, and draws upon theories of institutional change and the emotional dimensions of policymaking to contend that these ideas played a structural role in shaping emerging conceptions of a post-Cold War world order. Moreover, it shows that Britain was not a passive recipient of American intellectual currents but an active participant in a transatlantic dialogue over the future of international order and Britain's place within it. Through close analysis of British foreign policy commentary, particularly debates surrounding European integration, Atlanticism, and national capability, it reveals a range of competing visions that reflected both opportunity and constraint, summarised as 'wide horizons, slender means.' Rather than producing a coherent post-Cold War role, this overflowing marketplace of ideas generated fragmentation and indecision, contributing to Britain's prolonged difficulty in defining a stable foreign policy identity in the final years of the twentieth century and beyond.
Throughout the mid-eighteenth century, as the Seven Years War and other imperial conflicts generated intense violence and economic distress throughout the British Atlantic World, those living on the fringes of empire, such as Irish Catholics, dissenting Ulster Scots, and those living along the mid-Atlantic frontier, responded in kind with violence of their own. Although violent extralegal groups such as the Whiteboys in Ireland (and their contemporaries the Paxton Boys, the Black Boys, and the Augusta Boys in North America) responded to tensions within their own specific colonial contexts, these groups drew from a well-established tradition of violence in the legal system, such as public whippings and executions, as well as from community traditions of revelry. In borrowing from these already acceptable forms of violence throughout the British Atlantic World, the Whiteboys adapted those structures of pageantry to fit their needs and grievances within a framework of authority and legitimacy. Understanding the ways the Whiteboys engaged with these pre-existing, legitimate structures of legal violence and street culture allow historians to view the Whiteboys within a broader, transatlantic context. However, despite their claims to legitimacy, the state's response to the Whiteboys' violence was unsurprisingly clear as British officials on both sides of the Atlantic prosecuted them with the full force of the law and ultimately resorted to legal violence. The violence enacted by both sides was melodramatic and full of meticulously choreographed pageantry, but it was a common vocabulary that allowed these extralegal groups and the state to converse with each other in pointed ways.
This article explores early modern English and Scottish visits to libraries in Continental Europe through the prism of tourism history to argue that the period was crucial for the early development of bibliotourism. Travellers experienced libraries as holistic spaces, paying attention to the appearance of the buildings, decorations inside the libraries they visited, and the materiality of the objects they encountered. Their experience of libraries was curated by librarians and library-keepers, who created tourist trails consisting of a limited number of star exhibits in their collections. Visitors often experienced libraries in conjunction with other similar institutions, especially cabinets of curiosities. Libraries were a place for in-depth scholarship for some, but they were sightseeing tourist destinations for most visitors.
The British Empire intervened on the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir in 1885, imposing a Resident on the state's ruler for the first time. While one of their primary intentions was to build a railroad connection between the state and British India, the project failed. This episode has largely been set within the context of Britain's strategic rivalry with Russia over Central Asia, the so-called Great Game. However, focusing on the example of the failed railroad casts the episode in new light. The story of the failed railroad reveals that the intervention was less a product of strategic rivalry with Russia, wherein Jammu & Kashmir was considered at most a sideshow, and instead was driven by motivators such as the civilizing mission, imperial romanticism, and tourism.
The Imperial Federation movement aimed to unite the empire in a federal form and to counteract tendencies towards separation. Many historians have commented on the movement, but have tended to do so in broad-brush terms and do not explain the relationship between Imperial Federation and the British Commonwealth. The period from 1910 to 1921 witnessed a sharp decline in the discussion of Imperial Federation. The decline was paralleled by a rise in the use of the term 'British Commonwealth' as an alternative locus for discussion of the theme of imperial unity. This article will explain how the conceptual shift from 'Imperial Federation' to 'British Commonwealth' happened and what caused the transition by using the British newspapers in the Gale Primary Sources database. Dominions' requirement for more autonomy, Irish independence and WWI might have altogether contributed to the transition by opposing the design of establishing a representative Imperial Parliament.
This article reviews the career of William Paterson, a Scottish colonial administrator in the mid-eighteenth century. Using several understudied manuscript sources, it reconstructs his conflicts with local colonial institutions, his conception of Britain's imperial political economy, and his idea of the British Empire as an Atlantic polity. Though recent scholarship has argued for a patriot movement in the 1720s and 1730s and a conservative-reactionary response to radical Whiggism in the 1750s and 1760s, this article argues that Paterson represented a Scoto-British tradition and view of Britain's empire that had taken shape during the first half of the eighteenth century. It demonstrates links between his manuscript materials and the writings of Sir William Keith, a colonial official and imperial theorist, and James Thomson, a close friend of Paterson's. It suggests that their worldview, though grounded in the celebration of the Glorious Revolution, the 1707 Union between England and Scotland, the Hanoverian succession, and an imperial polity that was commercial and maritime, had become conservative by the second quarter of the eighteenth century. After 1763, Paterson's Atlantic vision of the British Empire became increasingly untenable with Britain's growing global empire, and ultimately unrealizable after American independence in 1776.
This paper examines open letters written by British and Indian intellectuals during the Second World War. Supporters and apologists of the British Empire often trumpeted its liberal foundations. Grounded in a philosophical tradition of individual expression and representative institutions, liberal-imperialism ‘emancipated’ individuals and nations across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In practice, however, emancipation often took the form of violent exploitation. During the Second World War, the dichotomy between liberalism in Europe and liberal-imperialism outside of Europe produced radically different understandings of the British war effort. In England, liberalism was worth defending against Nazi barbarism, while in India it was an iniquitous justification for continued exploitation. This paper explores these fragmented realities by analyzing open letters written by Eleanor Rathbone, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sir Hari Singh Gour, H.G. Wells, and Mohandas Gandhi.
From the labour dispute in Tonypandy in 1910 through the withdrawal of British forces from the Irish Free State, General Sir Cecil Frederick Nevil ‘Nevil’ Macready served as the British government's trusted agent for using imperial methods to preserve or restore order within the United Kingdom. Macready's commitment to enforce the policies of the Liberal and the Coalition governments before, during, and after the First World War and his application of his experiences as a soldier and an administrator in the British Empire in both war and peace embody the ways that the practices of empire collided with the assumptions of liberalism at home. In the labour disputes in Wales in 1910 and the increasing tension in Ireland over Home Rule in 1914, Macready's personal judgement and tact proved superior in managing the threat of disorder. During the war, both his role in supporting the Government's policy of conscription and his leadership of the London Metropolitan Police after a strike by the rank-and-file Police Constables in 1918 maintained Britain's war effort at home while seeking to improve the lives of those he led. As the last British commander in Ireland before the establishment of the Irish Free State he understood the failures of Britain's forces as an inability to carry out the methods that had worked previously in his career. Analysing Macready's career reveals the contradictions and continuities between liberalism and imperialism at the apogee of both within Britain.
After 20 years of British rule, Florida reverted to a Spanish colony after the America Revolution. This political change opened an opportunity for the enslaved population to challenge the authority of their enslavers as British colonists fled the now Spanish colony in order to live in the British Empire. This article demonstrates how the transition gave enslaved people leverage to negotiate for better living conditions by using time as a tool of resistance.
The Bright Young People, a loose association of upper-class individuals active during the 1920s and 1930s, are most commonly associated – by historians and contemporaries alike – with Mayfair in London's West End. However, their social world reached far beyond a single neighborhood in the capital. Indeed, it would extend to greater London, the British countryside, and, as demonstrated in this article, the European continent. This travel across the Channel would also reaffirm the importance of European culture linkages with Britain during a period of the ‘Americanization’ of British culture. While this Continental travel was evocative of earlier forms of aristocratic and upper-class travel, the Bright Young People would refashion these journeys abroad to reflect metropolitan modes of socializing. In transposing their Mayfair behavior to foreign locales, the Bright Young People, as the example of Diana Cooper in Venice demonstrates, would open themselves up to critiques from the British press and members of their own class. Cooper would lead a misguided treasure hunt across Venice in September 1926, drawing a degree of ire from Venetians, but more forceful condemnations from the British press. These reports would call into question perceived upper-class misbehavior, particularly that perpetrated by aristocratic women. While such behavior was tolerated at home, doing so abroad ran the risk of damaging British prestige and the status of women within British society.
The Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ (subsequently Heads of Government) Meetings or Conferences were the flagship events of the New Commonwealth in the two decades after the Second World War and the beginning of formal independence and decolonisation in South Asia. The post-war Commonwealth leadership sought to maintain unity on key international issues, which served British strategic interests, at least in the view of British leaders, officials, and influential commentators. The collision of interests between the expansion of Commonwealth membership to include South Asian and, later, African states and the managed decolonisation of the British Empire produced conflicts and compromises that often shaped the progress of the Prime Ministers’ Meetings. The New Commonwealth’s functioning as an international forum can be better understood by developing insights gained from interdisciplinary methodologies to explore the central role of Jawaharlal Nehru’s uses of space at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Meetings to highlight continuities that, ironically, facilitated the profound changes of this era. Taking seriously the multivalent meanings and historical complexity of the Britain and the World analytical framework, we show how British space increasingly came to be used to advance South Asian political goals.
During the Second World War, the rebuilding of Europe was envisioned not only in terms of bricks and mortar, but also books. Between November 1942 and December 1945, the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education repeatedly met in London to discuss the role of culture and education in postwar reconstruction. One of the projects it led to was The European Inheritance (1954), a multi-authored publication that was meant to communicate as impartially as possible the history of Europe and its influence fl uence on the world. The CAME meetings have so far rarely been studied and are usually perceived as having laid the groundwork for the creation of the far more influential fl uential United Nations Educational, Scientific fi c and Cultural Organisation (November 1945). This paper instead argues that CAME and the activities that ensued from it deserve to be studied in their own right. The European Inheritance, , in particular, provides a prism through which to analyse the slow transition from the ' imperial internationalism' ' of the early twentieth century to a burgeoning postcolonial world order, alongside which new forms of European intergovernmental cooperation emerged. Furthermore, the vicissitudes of this history book provide insights into the cultural ambitions and the international position Britain was seeking for itself during and shortly after the Second World War. As chairman of the commission in charge of this project, the classicist and political theorist Ernest Barker reveals the moral, intellectual and pragmatic motivations and negotiations that steered the production of this book through the push and pull of national and internationalist interests.
This article relates how tropical disease ravaged the British army in the late-eighteenth-century Caribbean, using the San Juan expedition of 1780 as a case study. Based on eighteenth-century European understandings of epidemiology, martial and medicinal officials of the San Juan expedition believed that the outbreak of pestilence within the British army reflected a failure in discipline, properly provisioning troops, as well as overall leadership and planning. Thus, despite natural agents playing a significant role in stalling Britain's advance in Nicaragua, eighteenth-century military and medical authorities dictated that difficulties caused by disease and the environment could be overcome by human might. While the British ultimately could not overcome the devastating effects that tropical diseases had on the army, human agency also led to the expedition's failure. The British did not maintain good relations with their Indigenous allies, the Miskito, which resulted in their abandonment of the campaign. Consequently, they were left without crucial soldiers, guides, and labourers who were necessary to continue the invasion of Central America. Moreover, the Spaniards' stout defence of their territory also hindered the British expeditionary force, stalling their advance at the Castillo de la Inmaculada Concepci & oacute;n. As a result, both natural and human agency dictated the outcome of the San Juan expedition.
