By Tom Shillam As Christopher Lee has written, decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century constituted ‘a complex dialectical intersection of competing views and claims over colonial pasts, transitional presents, and inchoate futures’ as much as ‘a linear, diplomatic transfer of power’.[1] This is also an observation which scholars of the transnational cultural and intellectual histories of […]
By Maureen McCord Why did so many South Asians, in the early years of the nineteenth century, choose to become indentured laborers, signing five years of their lives away to work on sugar plantations in Mauritius? Previous work on the earliest years of Indian indentured labor—a labor practice which eventually spread from this small Mascarene […]
By Niels Boender The sudden ubiquitousness of debates about historical memory, driven by important awakenings regarding systematic injustices, have thrust historians to the centre of what is now popularly called ‘the culture wars’. This offers an opportunity for historians to share their findings in ways that palpably impact understandings of global and national histories, as […]
By Emma Wordsworth Food, despite being both a biological necessity and a symbolic cultural touchstone, has only recently been recognised as a major historical force. As historian David Arnold persuasively argued in 1988, “food was, and continues to be, power in a most basic, tangible, and inescapable form”.[1] Certainly, in the early 1870s, the issue […]
By Nandini Bhattacharya. A difficult summer overlain with the tragedies and vicissitudes of a global pandemic has nonetheless provided moments of hope and unbridled joy. The latter related to the Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protests in Britain. Of the many soul-stirring moments that BLM raised for me this season, the removal at Bristol […]
By Nicolás Gómez Baeza. Between 1888-89, John Hamilton, Henry Jamieson, John McLean and Thomas Saunders, among others, participated in the so-called “big sheep-ride” [“gran arreo”] through southern Patagonia.[1] Who were they? Three were born in Scotland, worked as shepherds in the Falkland Islands, and became landowners and businessmen in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego; […]
By Jordan Buchanan. In 1924, the Member of Parliament for Swansea West, Walter Runciman, claimed that ‘there are more Scotsmen in Argentina than there are in Glasgow, and our trading in Argentina is of the greatest importance.’[1] His address to parliament was directed at soliciting its support for British traders in Argentina as Britain’s dominant […]
By Lauren Brown. The history of the British Empire has long been framed as a heroic, civilising mission that successfully thrust ‘inferior’ societies into modernity. Thankfully, such rose-tinted nostalgia has begun to fade. The Mau Mau Rebellion of 1952-1964 was a particularly brutal period of British colonial history. Fed by decades of anger over the […]