Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T22:57:40.991Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Rethinking the British World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2013

Abstract

This article rethinks the concept of the “British World” by paying close attention to the voices of those who attended the 1903 Allied Colonial Universities Conference. They identified not one, but three different kinds of British world space. Mapped, respectively, by ideas and emotions, by networks and exchange, and by the specific sites of empire, this article suggests that, in the light of criticisms the British World concept has faced, and in the context of recent scholarship on the social and material production of space, this tripartite approach might offer a useful framework for British and imperial historians interested in the history of the global.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Bryce, James, “Official Report of the Allied Colonial Universities Conference,” Empire Review 6, no. 31 (August 1903): 73Google Scholar.

2 For an overview of the origins of the project, see Buckner, Phillip A., “Introduction: The British World,” History of Intellectual Culture 4, no.1 (2004): 14Google Scholar.

3 Ward, Stuart, “Sentiment and Self-Interest: The Imperial Ideal in Anglo-Australian Commercial Culture,” Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 116 (April 2001): 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O., “Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire,” in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O. (New York, 2006), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, Catherine, “Culture and Identity in Imperial Britain,” in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Stockwell, Sarah E. (Malden, MA, 2007), 202Google Scholar.

5 Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent, “Mapping the British World,” in The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity, ed. Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent (London, 2003), 2Google Scholar.

6 Pocock, J. G. A., The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005), 22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bridge and Fedorowich, “Mapping the British World,” 6. See also Pocock, J. G. A., “Conclusion, Contingency, Identity, Sovereignty,” in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. Grant, Alexander and Stringer, Keith J. (London, 1995), 297Google Scholar.

7 Bridge and Fedorowich, “Mapping the British World,” 11.

8 Jones, M. A., “The Background to Emigration from Great Britain,” in Dislocation and Emigration: The Social Background of American Immigration, ed. Fleming, D. and Bailyn, B. (Cambridge, MA, 1974), 3334Google Scholar; Constantine, Stephen and Harper, Marjory, Migration and Empire (Oxford, 2010)Google Scholar; Erickson, Charlotte, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants to Nineteenth-Century America (London, 1972)Google Scholar.

9 Bridge and Fedorowich, “Mapping the British World,” 6.

10 Ibid.

11 Darian-Smith, Kate, Grimshaw, Patricia, and Macintyre, Stuart, ed., Britishness Aborad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures (Melbourne, 2007)Google Scholar.

12 For example, see Lowry, Donal, “The Crown, Empire Loyalism and the Assimilation of Non-British White Subjects in the British World: An Argument against ‘Ethnic Determinism,’Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 2 (May 2003): 96120CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dubow, Saul, “How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 1 (March 2009): 127CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Buckner, Phillip A., “Introduction: The British World,” History of Intellectual Culture 4, no. 1 (2004), 3Google Scholar; Hopkins, A. G., “Rethinking Decolonization,” Past & Present 200 (August 2008): 211–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Bridge and Fedorowich, The British WorldGoogle Scholar; Buckner, Phillip A. and Francis, R. Douglas, eds., Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2006)Google Scholar; Buckner, Phillip A. and Francis, R. Douglas, eds., Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration, and Identity (Vancouver, 2006)Google Scholar; Darian-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre, Britishness Abroad; Buckner, Phillip A. and Bridge, Carl, “Reinventing the British World,” Round Table 368 (January 2003): 7788CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Potter, Simon J., News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nasson, Bill, Britannia's Empire: Making a British World (Stroud, 2004)Google Scholar; Jeffery, Keith, “The Road to Asia, and the Grafton Hotel, Dublin: Ireland in the ‘British World,’Irish Historical Studies 36 (November 2008): 243–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffiths, John, “Were There Municipal Networks in the British World, c1890–1939?Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37 (December 2009): 575–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pietsch, Tamson, “Wandering Scholars? Academic Mobility and the British World, 1850–1940,” Journal of Historical Geography 36 (October 2010): 377–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pickles, Katie, “The Obvious and the Awkward: Postcolonialism and the British World,” New Zealand Journal of History 45, no. 1 (April 2011): 85101Google Scholar; Downing, Arthur, “The Friendly Planet: ‘Oddfellows,' Networks, and the ‘British World,' c.1840–1914,” Journal of Global History 7, no. 3 (November 2012): 389414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Buckner and Francis, Rediscovering the British World, 18.

16 Armitage, David, “Greater Britain: A Useful Historical Category?American Historical Review 104, no. 2 (April 1999): 427–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thistlethwaite, Frank, The Anglo-American Connection of the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Armitage, David and Braddick, Michael J., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2002)Google Scholar; Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Phillip D., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar.

17 Buckner and Francis, Canada and the British World. The work of historians seeking to recover the role that the various national groups from within the United Kingdom played in the story of Britain's empire might also be seen in this light. See Aled Jones and Billie Jones, “The Welsh World and the British Empire, c 1851–1939,” in Bridge and Fedorowich, The British World; Watson, James, “English Associationalism in the British Empire: Yorkshire Societies in New Zealand before the First World War,” Britain and the World 4 (March 2011): 84108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Potter, News and the British World.

19 For example, see Ballantyne, Tony, “Thinking Local: Knowledge, Sociability and Community in Gore's Intellectual Life, 1875–1914,” New Zealand Journal of History 44 (October 2010): 138–56Google Scholar.

20 Wolfe, Patrick, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (December 2006), 387409CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Veracini, Lorenzo, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall and Rose, “Introduction: Being at Home with the Empire”; Frankenberg, Ruth, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis, 1993)Google Scholar; Bonnett, Alastair, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (Harlow, 2000)Google Scholar; Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Lester, Alan, “Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire,” History Compass 4, no. 1 (January 2006): 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Dubow, “How British Was the British World?”, 2. Dubow is perhaps referring to Tony Ballantyne's contention that the “use of ‘Britishness” as an analytical apparatus not only marks a return to C.W. Dilke's celebration of Britishness and empire but also is an impoverished and reductive model for the history of multiethnic and polyglot colonial societies for removed from the United Kingdom. See Ballantyne, Tony, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke, 2001), 3Google Scholar.

23 Buckner and Francis, introduction to Rediscovering the British World, 18–19.

24 Biersack, Aletta and Hunt, Lynn A., eds., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989)Google Scholar; Black, Lawrence, “‘What Kind of People Are You?’ Labour, the People, and the ‘New Political History,’” in Interpreting the Labour Party: Approaches to Labour Politics and History, ed. Callaghan, John, Fielding, Steven, and Ludlam, Steve (Manchester, 2003), 2338Google Scholar.

25 Epstein, James, “Introduction: New Directions in Political History,” Journal of British Studies 41, no. 3 (2002): 255–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Jay M., “No More Language Games: Words, Beliefs, and the Culture of Early Modern France,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1439CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Ferguson calls it “Anglobalization”; Belich, the “settler revolution.” Ferguson, Niall, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2003)Google Scholar; Belich, James, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Darwin, John, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Magee, Gary Bryan and Thompson, Andrew S., Empire and Globalization: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, Duncan, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McIntyre, W. David, The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907–48 (Basingstoke, 2009)Google Scholar.

28 A key work here is Soja, Edward W., “The Socio-spatial Dialectic,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70, no. 2 (June 1980): 207–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which Soja argued that “social and spatial relations are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent.” See also Soja, E., Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London, 1989)Google Scholar; Massey, Doreen, For Space (London, 2005)Google Scholar; Dear, Michael J. and Flusty, Steven, eds., The Spaces of Postmodernity: Readings in Human Geography (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar.

29 Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar; Stoler, Ann L. and Cooper, Frederick, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Stoler, Ann L. and Cooper, Frederick (Berkeley, 1997)Google Scholar; Sassen, Saskia, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Sassen, Saskia, ed., Global Networks, Linked Cities (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

30 Thompson, John B., The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge, 1995), 8Google Scholar. For the importance of networks to imperial history, see Bayly, Christopher A., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Lester, Alan, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 2448CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 12, 195; Potter, Simon J., “Webs, Networks and Systems: Globalization and the Mass Media in the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Empire,” Journal of British Studies 46, no. 3 (July 2007): 621–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Potter, “Webs, Networks and Systems,” 622.

32 Charles Maier in Tyrrell, Ian, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (November 2009): 467CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Potter, Simon J., “Empire, Cultures and Identities in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain,” History Compass 5, no. 1 (January 2007): 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Hazareesingh, Sandip, “Interconnected Synchronicities: The Production of Bombay and Glasgow as Modern Global Ports, c. 1850–1880,” Journal of Global History 1, no. 4 (March 2009): 731CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Harvey, David, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (New York, 2009), 135Google Scholar. See also “Space as a Key Word,” in Harvey, David, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Toward a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London, 2006), 119–48Google Scholar.

35 Harvey, “Space as a Key World,” 128.

36 Ibid., 277.

37 Harvey, David, Social Justice and the City (London, 1973)Google Scholar; Harvey, “Space as a Key Word,” 120.

38 Lefebvre speaks about (1) material space (spaces as experienced through our sense perceptions), (2) the representation of space (the way we conceive and represent this world of experienced sense perceptions), and (3) what he calls the “spaces of representation” (the way we live in and through the spaces we perceive and conceive). For Lefebvre, then, space is inherently imbued with the traces of the processes that produced it. See Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, 141–65.

39 Sheppard, Eric, “David Harvey and Dialectical Space-Time,” in David Harvey: A Critical Reader, ed. Castree, Noel and Gregory, Derek (Oxford, 2006), 121–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Headrick, Daniel R., The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981), 167Google Scholar; Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 108.

41 I take up these connections in detail in Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939 (Manchester, 2013).

42 For example, see MacLeod, Roy and Collins, Peter, eds., The Parliament of Science: The British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–1981 (Northwood, 1981)Google Scholar; Withers, Charles, Geography and Science in Britain, 1831–1939: A Study of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Manchester, 2010)Google Scholar.

43 Letter concerning the Allied Colonial Universities Dinner, from E. N. Fere and L. C. R. Arnott (Hon. Secs.), 15 January 1903, Registrar's Correspondence, Series 200, 1903/156, University of Adelaide Archives.

44 Bryce, in “Official Report,” 77. See also Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 94–99.

45 “The Allied Colonial Universities Conference,” The Times, 13 July 1903, 9.

46 Greenlee, James, “The ABCs of Imperial Unity,” Canadian Journal of History 14, no.1 (April 1979): 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Bell, Duncan, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 For more on the 1903 conference, the congresses and the Universities Bureau see Pietsch, Tamson, “‘Mending a Broken World': The Universities and the Nation, 1918–36,” in Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain between the Wars, ed. Beers, L. and Thomas, G. (London, 2011), 161–80Google Scholar; Pietsch, Tamson, “Out of Empire: The Universities' Bureau and the Congresses of the Universities of the British Empire, 1913–1939,” in Universities for a “New World”: A Commonwealth of Knowledge and Skills, 1913–2013, ed. Schreuder, D. (Sage, forthcoming 2013)Google Scholar.

49 “Official Report,” 78.

50 Ibid., 117.

51 Ibid., 74.

52 Ibid., 85.

53 Ibid., 95, 101.

54 Ibid., 111, 113–14.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 81, 113.

57 Ibid., 103.

58 Pietsch, “Wandering Scholars?”

59 “Official Report,” 77.

60 Ibid., 80, 118.

61 “Official Report,” 122.

62 Ibid., 119.

63 Ibid., 72.

64 Haldane, in ibid., 119.

65 Ibid., 124.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 78, 83, 109.

68 Ibid., 116.

69 Ibid., 79.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid., 117

72 Ibid., 93.

73 Ibid., 79.

74 Ibid., 118.

75 See Pietsch, Empire of Scholars, 90–94.

76 Ibid., 102.

77 Ibid., 91.

78 Ibid., 109.

79 F. H. Chase, in ibid., 78.

80 Chilton, Lisa, “A New Class of Women for the Colonies: The Imperial Colonist and the Construction of Empire,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 2 (May 2003): 3656CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin, Ged, “The Idea of ‘Imperial Federation,” in Reappraisals in British Imperial History, ed. Hyam and Martin (London, 1975), 121–39Google Scholar; Schreuder, Deryck M. and Ward, Stuart, Australia’s Empire (Oxford, 2008)Google Scholar; Buckner and Francis, Canada and the British World.

81 Bickers, Robert A., ed., Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an earlier period, see Ogborn, Miles, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar.

82 For example, see Bayly, Chris, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar; Ballantyne, Tony, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Durham, NC, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Boehmer, Elleke, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hofmeyr, Isabel, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of the Pilgrim's Progress (Princeton, NJ, 2004)Google Scholar.

83 Hobson, J. A., “The Ethics of Internationalism,” International Journal of Ethics 17, no. 1 (October 1906): 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 Pietsch, “Wandering Scholars?”

85 Potter, “Webs, Networks and Systems,” 631, 633. See also Potter, News and the British World.

86 Potter, “Webs, Networks and Systems,” 636.

87 Ibid., 634.

88 Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalization, 170.

89 Ibid., 14.

90 “Official Report,” 109.

91 Ibid., 83.

92 Bell, Duncan, “Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought,” Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (March 2006): 297CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93 Froude, quoted in Cain, Peter J., “Empire and the Languages of Character and Virtue in Later Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 2 (August 2007): 259CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Belich, James used the term “better Britains” in Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders, from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Albany, NZ, 2001)Google Scholar.

95 Pietsch, Tamson, “A British Sea: Making Sense of Global Space in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Global History 5, no. 3 (November 2010): 430CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 “Official Report,” 79.

97 Burton, Antoinette, “Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Burton, Antoinette (Durham, NC, 2003), 23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Sassen, Saskia, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, 1991)Google Scholar; Sassen, Saskia, Cities in a World Economy (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1994)Google Scholar; Taylor, Peter J., World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis (London, 2004)Google Scholar; Beaverstock, Jonathan V., Smith, Richard G., and Taylor, Peter J., “World City Network: A New Metageography?Annals, Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (March 2000), 123–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brenner, Neil and Keil, Roger, “Editor’s Introduction: Global City Theory in Retrospect and Prospect,” in The Global Cities Reader, ed. Brenner, Neil and Keil, Roger (London, 2006), 116Google Scholar; Taylor, Peter J., Derudder, Ben, Saey, Pieter, and Witlox, Frank, eds., Cities in Globalization: Practices, Policies and Theories (London, 2007), 5271Google Scholar.

99 Finnegan, Diarmid A., “The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 41, no. 2 (Summer 2008), 369–88CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Livingstone, David N., “The Spaces of Knowledge: Contributions towards a Historical Geography of Science,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, no. 1 (1995): 534CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapin, Steven, “Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems in the Location of Science,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23, no. 1 (April 1998): 512CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Crosbie, Agar, Jon, and Schmidt, Gerald, eds., Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Withers, Charles, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meusenburger, Peter, Livingstone, David, and Jöns, Heike, eds., Geographies of Science (Heidelberg, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

100 Livingstone, David N., Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes, 1987)Google Scholar; Forgan, Sophie, “Bricks and Bones: Architecture and Science in Victorian Britain,” in The Architecture of Science, ed. Galison, Peter and Thompson, Emily (Cambridge MA, 1999), 181208Google Scholar; Kraft, Alison and Alberti, Samuel, “‘Equal Though Different’: Laboratories, Museums and the Institutional Development of Biology in Late-Victorian Northern England,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34, no. 2 (June 2003): 203–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 Ophir, Adi and Shapin, Steven, “The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context 4, no. 1 (March 1991): 321CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Withers, Charles W. J., “Reporting, Mapping, Trusting: Making Geographical Knowledge in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Isis 90, no. 3 (September 1999): 497521Google Scholar; Driver, Felix, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; Butlin, Robin A., Geographies of Empire: European Empires and Colonies, c. 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar; Howell, Phillip, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar.

102 Mann, Gregory, “Locating Colonial Histories: Between France and West Africa,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 410CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

103 Howell, Geographies of Regulation, 21. Work on port cities here is instructive. See, for example, Bickers, Robert, “Shanghailanders: Formation and Identity of the British Settler community in Shanghai,” Past and Present 159, no. 1 (May 1998): 161211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

104 Dubow, Saul, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford, 2006), 162Google Scholar.

105 Dubow, Saul, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.

106 J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands, 181–91.