This thesis discusses the extent to which there is a shift in the discourse used in British news correspondence on slavery in the West Indies in the 50 years leading up to the abolition in 1833 and...Show moreThis thesis discusses the extent to which there is a shift in the discourse used in British news correspondence on slavery in the West Indies in the 50 years leading up to the abolition in 1833 and how this represents the advances of the abolitionist movement in that period. It does so by discursively analyzing used in newspaper articles from 1766 until 1833.Show less
Orthodox accounts of the British Labour governments in power between 1945 and 1951 are mistaken in presenting the government’s management of the sterling crises as having been apolitical and...Show moreOrthodox accounts of the British Labour governments in power between 1945 and 1951 are mistaken in presenting the government’s management of the sterling crises as having been apolitical and pragmatic. This thesis compares the effects of Britain’s sterling area policies on Britain and the British Empire more widely, in order to evaluate the consequences of their domestic social democratic reforms and the reconstruction of the wider British economy beyond the British experience. Contra orthodox historians of the period, the Attlee governments’ economic policy was deeply political in its design, implementation and consequences, subordinating the needs of colonial peoples to those of Britain in both design and practice. The British government relied on political control over the sterling area to obtain finance from the colonies at non-market rates. Without these loans, the Attlee governments may have had to have cut domestic expenditure or make greater political concessions to the USA in return for more American aid. Policies were implemented to mobilise colonial resources whose export would have a positive effect on the balance of payments crises. Although in some colonies this export drive laid the groundwork for economic development, in colonies where development projects were poorly implemented, particularly in West Africa, the benefits were not mutual. Furthermore, the Attlee governments effectively “outsourced” austerity to the colonies, resulting in shortages of goods and capital drain. This was achieved through their political control over the terms of trade in the sterling area. The negative effects of their policies on colonial living standards were known and contested, and ran counter to the Labour Party’s espoused socialist principles. However, ideological beliefs about race and the role of Britain in the world order may have influenced government decisions to protect British people at the expense of dependent colonies, and the Empire’s undemocratic political structure permitted it. That austerity measures in the colonies bear the hallmarks of measures for economic discipline traditionally employed in the 1920s and 1930s suggests that Attlee’s brand of social democracy did not transform the nature of capitalism to the extent that it may have appeared from a British perspective.Show less
The leading question in this research is how sir Granville St John Orde Browne imagined the ideal colonial labourer in correspondence and reports written in the course of his career, 1885-1945. It...Show moreThe leading question in this research is how sir Granville St John Orde Browne imagined the ideal colonial labourer in correspondence and reports written in the course of his career, 1885-1945. It asks specifically how men and women were represented or omitted within this imagining and why. It is argued that in the context of colonial labour, Orde Browne imagined the ideal colonial labourer as male and hereby excluded women from the realm of wage labour opportunities, instead discursively assigning them to the sphere of domesticity and recommending policies that limited female wage labour opportunities and reified a colonial idealization of wife-hood and motherhood. This exclusion was based on assumptions of women as especially traditional and conservative, a sexualization and associated demoralization of the independent presence of women in the compounds, and women being deemed inferior labourers. Men, on the other hand, were represented as objects of exploitation, whose bodies and minds were to be controlled through colonial policies with the aim of making labour migration as efficient and profitable as possible. Women within this structure were visualized as dependents who could either hinder said effective exploitation through the spread of disease and immorality, or could enable even more efficient and stable exploitation and ensure the reproduction of a future generation of workers.Show less
In a relatively short time Great Britain founded Iraq out of the three Ottoman vilayets Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. When British forces went ashore in Mesopotamia in a hurry to fight the Ottoman...Show moreIn a relatively short time Great Britain founded Iraq out of the three Ottoman vilayets Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. When British forces went ashore in Mesopotamia in a hurry to fight the Ottoman Empire because it had joined the First World War as one of the Axis, many policy issues had not been clarified yet. Too often did not only the army and the political officers on the ground, but the government officials in London as well work without a clear goal in mind. The question that begs to be asked is who was responsible for the policy in Mesopotamia. Hence, this is a study of the interaction within the British Empire during and right after World War I and its effects on policy development in Mesopotamia. When you zoom in on the British Empire, you will notice a diverse range of interests. This world encompassing Empire was not a monolith. Different regions and different political entities had conflicting ideas on the future of Mesopotamia. This thesis analyzes the British Empire itself to understand the confusion and contradictions in British policy-making following 1914 by leaving the core-periphery binary often assumed in imperialist historiography, and by paying attention to the webbed character of empires; multiple metropoles connected in a competing network.Show less
