The Imperial History Wars

Author: Dane Kennedy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474278884
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
The history of the British Empire, a subject that had slipped into obscurity when the empire came to an end, has since made a stunning comeback, generating a series of heated debates about the causes, character, and consequences of empire. In this volume Dane Kennedy offers a wide-ranging assessment of the main schools of thought that have transformed the way we view the British Empire and the world it helped to create. Navigating a clear course through these intellectual waters requires an awareness of their shifting currents and a commitment to tracking their changing character over time. Dane Kennedy has contributed to the imperial history wars for more than thirty years, and in this volume he brings his most important writings, along with brand new material, together for the first time to provide a sweeping overview of the subject and the debates that have shaped it. The Imperial History Wars is essential reading for any student or scholar of the British Empire.

Religion and the American Revolution

Author: Katherine Carté
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
For most of the eighteenth century, British protestantism was driven neither by the primacy of denominations nor by fundamental discord between them. Instead, it thrived as part of a complex transatlantic system that bound religious institutions to imperial politics. As Katherine Carte argues, British imperial protestantism proved remarkably effective in advancing both the interests of empire and the cause of religion until the war for American independence disrupted it. That Revolution forced a reassessment of the role of religion in public life on both sides of the Atlantic. Religious communities struggled to reorganize within and across new national borders. Religious leaders recalibrated their relationships to government. If these shifts were more pronounced in the United States than in Britain, the loss of a shared system nonetheless mattered to both nations. Sweeping and explicitly transatlantic, Religion and the American Revolution demonstrates that if religion helped set the terms through which Anglo-Americans encountered the imperial crisis and the violence of war, it likewise set the terms through which both nations could imagine the possibilities of a new world.

The Cambridge History of America and the World: Volume 1, 1500–1820

Author: Eliga Gould
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108317812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1073

Book Description
The first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines how the United States emerged out of a series of colonial interactions, some involving indigenous empires and communities that were already present when the first Europeans reached the Americas, others the adventurers and settlers dispatched by Europe's imperial powers to secure their American claims, and still others men and women brought as slaves or indentured servants to the colonies that European settlers founded. Collecting the thoughts of dynamic scholars working in the fields of early American, Atlantic, and global history, the volume presents an unrivalled portrait of the human richness and global connectedness of early modern America. Essay topics include exploration and environment, conquest and commerce, enslavement and emigration, dispossession and endurance, empire and independence, new forms of law and new forms of worship, and the creation and destruction when the peoples of four continents met in the Americas.

Disease, War, and the Imperial State

Author: Erica Charters
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022618014X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
The Seven Years’ War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India. In these locations diseases such as scurvy, smallpox, and yellow fever killed far more than combat did, stretching the resources of European states. In Disease, War, and the Imperial State, Erica Charters demonstrates how disease played a vital role in shaping strategy and campaigning, British state policy, and imperial relations during the Seven Years’ War. Military medicine was a crucial component of the British war effort; it was central to both eighteenth-century scientific innovation and the moral authority of the British state. Looking beyond the traditional focus of the British state as a fiscal war-making machine, Charters uncovers an imperial state conspicuously attending to the welfare of its armed forces, investing in medical research, and responding to local public opinion. Charters shows military medicine to be a credible scientific endeavor that was similarly responsive to local conditions and demands. Disease, War, and the Imperial State is an engaging study of early modern warfare and statecraft, one focused on the endless and laborious task of managing manpower in the face of virulent disease in the field, political opposition at home, and the clamor of public opinion in both Britain and its colonies.

British Imperial Air Power

Author: Alex M Spencer
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1557539421
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
British Imperial Air Power examines the air defense of Australia and New Zealand during the interwar period. It also demonstrates the difficulty of applying new military aviation technology to the defense of the global Empire and provides insight into the nature of the political relationship between the Pacific Dominions and Britain. Following World War I, both Dominions sought greater independence in defense and foreign policy. Public aversion to military matters and the economic dislocation resulting from the war and later the Depression left little money that could be provided for their respective air forces. As a result, the Empire’s air services spent the entire interwar period attempting to create a strategy in the face of these handicaps. In order to survive, the British Empire’s military air forces offered themselves as a practical and economical third option in the defense of Britain’s global Empire, intending to replace the Royal Navy and British Army as the traditional pillars of imperial defense.

The Imperial Cruise

Author: James Bradley
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316039667
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous twenty-one year old daughter Alice served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name. In 2005, a century later, James Bradley traveled in the wake of Roosevelt's mission and discovered what had transpired in Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila, Beijing and Seoul. In 1905, Roosevelt was bully-confident and made secret agreements that he though would secure America's westward push into the Pacific. Instead, he lit the long fuse on the Asian firecrackers that would singe America's hands for a century.

Imperial Endgame

Author: B. Grob-Fitzgibbon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230300383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

Book Description
In this fresh and controversial account of Britain's end of empire, Grob-Fitzgibbon reveals that the British government developed a successful strategy of decolonization following the Second World War based on devolving power to indigenous peoples within the Commonwealth.

Imperial Twilight

Author: Stephen R. Platt
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307961745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 609

Book Description
As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.

An Imperial World at War

Author: Ashley Jackson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317181905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
At the start of the Second World War, Britain was at the height of its imperial power, and it is no surprise that it drew upon the global resources of the Empire once war had been declared. Whilst this international aspect of Britain’s war effort has been well-studied in relation to the military contribution of individual dominions and colonies, relatively little has been written about the Empire as a whole. As such, An Imperial World at War makes an important contribution to the historiography relating to the British Empire and its wartime experience. It argues that the war needs to be viewed in imperial terms, that the role of forces drawn from the Empire is poorly understood and that the war's impact on colonial societies is barely grasped at all in conventional accounts. Through a series of case studies, the volume demonstrates the fundamental role played by the Empire in Britain’s war effort and highlights some of the consequences for both Britain and its imperial territories.Themes include the recruitment and utilization of military formations drawn from imperial territories, the experience of British forces stationed overseas, the use of strategic bases located in the colonies, British policy in the Middle East and the challenge posed by growing American power, the occupation of enemy colonies and the enemy occupation of British colonies, colonial civil defence measures, financial support for the war effort supplied by the Empire, and the commemoration of the war. The Afterword anticipates a new, decentred history of the war that properly acknowledges the role and importance of people and places throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world.’ This volume emanates from a conference organized as part of the ‘Home Fronts of the Empire – Commonwealth’ project. The project was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Yasmin Khan and Ashley Jackson with Gajendra Singh as Postdoctoral Research Assistant.

The French Imperial Nation-State

Author: Gary Wilder
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226897680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
France experienced a period of crisis following World War I when the relationship between the nation and its colonies became a subject of public debate. The French Imperial Nation-State focuses on two intersecting movements that redefined imperial politics—colonial humanism led by administrative reformers in West Africa and the Paris-based Negritude project, comprising African and Caribbean elites. Gary Wilder develops a sophisticated account of the contradictory character of colonial government and examines the cultural nationalism of Negritude as a multifaceted movement rooted in an alternative black public sphere. He argues that interwar France must be understood as an imperial nation-state—an integrated sociopolitical system that linked a parliamentary republic to an administrative empire. An interdisciplinary study of colonial modernity combining French history, colonial studies, and social theory, The French Imperial Nation-State will compel readers to revise conventional assumptions about the distinctions between republicanism and racism, metropolitan and colonial societies, and national and transnational processes.