Abstract During the inter-war years British colonial broadcasting policy revolved around the idea that radio could promote gradual economic, social and cultural change while heading off demand for increased political participation. ‘Wireless’ could serve the needs of the colonial state by encouraging ‘colonial development’ and by reinforcing the loyalty of colonial subjects. Communal village listening and ‘wired wireless’ systems were seen as the best means to harness the psychological impact of radio listening to advance a particular vision of colonial modernity. Such schemes widened, but also controlled, access to the wireless world. This article adopts a ‘connected history’ approach to show how ideas about colonial broadcasting crossed the internal borders of empire, with India, Palestine and the Gold Coast in particular being used as models for state broadcasting initiatives in other colonies. Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany also provided inspiration. While the British Broadcasting Company played a key role advising colonial and imperial civil servants, it seldom itself proved a model for colonial broadcasting systems, which were intended for authoritarian rather than democratic political settings. This article also examines the significant gap between the ambitions of imperial and colonial policymakers and the reality of the sluggish growth of colonial broadcasting infrastructure and audiences. The pervasive poverty of British colonies was an obstacle to both private and colonial state investment in radio, and the British government failed to step in to offer subsidies to support colonial broadcasting. The impact of broadcasting in British colonies thus generally remained potential rather than actual.
The early sixteenth century saw the simultaneous rise of two empires in the Mediterranean: one Christian, ruled by the Habsburgs, based in Spain and Austria, and one Muslim, by the Ottomans, ruling over the Balkans and Anatolia and centred in Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. With their ascendancy came a fierce imperial rivalry for world domination-that is, to unite Christendom and the Islamic lands under one rule and one faith, as had been the case under Constantine the Great. Although the general contours of the military aspects of the conflict are relatively well known, its multifaceted diplomatic, cultural and ideological engagements have been little studied. Using sources in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Italian, Latin, French, and Spanish, this articles addresses this gap in the scholarship by analysing the two unusual and unprecedented honorifics of Sultan S & uuml;leyman's (r. 1520-1566) famous favourite and grand vizier (the chief advisor and highest-ranking official of the sultan) & Idot;brahim Pasha (1523-1536), namely, ser'asker and ser'asker-sultan, which the pasha adopted in 1529 and 1533, respectively, within the context of the Ottoman-Habsburg competition for world rule. It argues that the titles were invented to mimic the particular position of Emperor Charles's younger brother, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, in the Holy Roman Empire-first as the emperor's governor (1521-1531) and later as a subordinate king (1531-1556), holding the title of King of the Romans-and thereby promote S & uuml;leyman's status as the true successor to the Roman Caesars.
