Abstract: The Great War was indeed a world war. Imperial powers like Great Britain drew on their far-flung empires not only for resources but also for manpower. This essay examines one important (though still inadequately studied) aspect of British wartime exigency, the voluntary and coerced participation of the British Empire's coloured subjects and allies in military operations on the Western Front. With the exception of the Indian Army in the first year of the war, that participation did not include combat. Instead coloured troops, later joined by contract labourers, played major roles behind the lines. From 1916 onwards, well over a quarter million Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, South Africans, West Indians, New Zealand Maoris, Black Canadians, and Pacific Islanders worked the docks, built roads and railways, maintained equipment, produced munitions, dug trenches, and even buried the dead. Only in recent years has the magnitude of their contribution to Allied victory begun to be more fully acknowledged. Yet the greatest impact of British labour policies in France might lie elsewhere entirely. Chinese workers seem likely to have carried the virus that caused the Great Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which may have killed more people around the world than the war itself.

Abstract: Virginia was founded with a certainty of common humanity that had disastrous consequences for its native peoples. The English established Jamestown in 1607—in what was to become their first permanent settlement in America—with all the mixed motivations of benevolence and grasping desire of any colonial enterprise. Yet they firmly believed the peoples that they found there, whom they called Indians, were as human as themselves. Convinced that they possessed an absolute truth valid for all peoples in all times and places, they desired to embrace and mould these Indians into their own ideal vision of humanity. It was this inclusive embrace of the Indians, and not any cynical attempts to exploit them or to denigrate them as “other,” which led to the destruction of their way of life. The tragedy of the colony was due to the most benevolent of intentions.

Abstract: During the eighteenth century, the global environment of imperial competition and cooperation encouraged the circulation of highly qualified mapmaking personnel from the service of one ruler to the other, thus contributing to the dissemination of cartographic knowledge. This article examines the career of military engineer and mapmaker Michel Angelo de Blasco (1697-1772), whose life in the service of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Portuguese Empire illustrates the importance of trans-imperial approaches to the history of cartography. As Vienna and Lisbon sponsored large mapmaking enterprises, including border demarcations and military surveys, skilled cartographers became precious resources for these empires. However, in the case of de Blasco, the invaluable service done in Brazil for the Portuguese monarch, made him both sought-after as a potential information source for the Habsburg monarchs and unemployable due to the risk of a diplomatic conflict. The efforts of de Blasco to transition back into the service of Vienna included the unauthorised submission of cartographic material. Additionally, the details of the negotiations regarding this mapmaker's possible transfer reveal the processes of institutionalisation and centralisation Habsburg cartography underwent during the time of Maria Theresa (1740-80).

Abstract: In the summer of 1916, the British Salonica Army and the Cyprus colonial government established the Cypriot Mule Corps (officially called the Macedonian Mule Corps), composed of mostly of Christian (Eastern Orthodox, and smaller numbers of Catholics, Armenians, and Maronites) and Muslim Cypriot muleteers and interpreters. These men served mostly in Salonica during the war and in Istanbul after the armistice. Although given the title of “Macedonian” Mule Corps, it was almost exclusively Cypriot in composition, with a staggering enlistment of about 12,000 Cypriots from every religious group in Cyprus. This article explores the formation of the corps, muleteer numbers, and recruitment strategies. It argues that there were both push and pull factors in understanding the striking enlistment of between 20 and 25 per cent of peasant and labouring men aged between 18 and 39.

Abstract: During the second half of the eighteenth century, the first Muslim rulers of Mysore—Haidar ‘Ali (c. 1720-82) and his son Tipu Sultan (c. 1750-99)—were amongst the first South and West Asian rulers to unleash a process of administrative, socio-economic and military protomodernisation. Haidar, a rather cautious and pragmatic autocrat who could neither read nor write, ruled within the framework of the traditional Mughal system of governance. Highly skilled in administrative, military and diplomatic realms, he initiated the proto-modernisation of the army and took some important measures towards the establishment of a central state. In turn, Tipu was an educated autocrat, fond of administrative, socio-economic, military, and technological inventions and innovations which he intended to use in the struggle against the British occupying forces in South India. In the extant literature, Tipu is either being idealised as an “enlightened” ruler or described as a pre-modern despot. Few scholars have given a balanced account of his rule by depicting both his autocratic style of leadership, as well as the pragmatic features and proto-modernising aspects of his rule. This article is concerned with the biographic and historical background of Haidar ‘Ali and Tipu Sultan and aims to furnish a concerted account of their rule by consulting fresh printed and unprinted primary sources in English, French and German.

Abstract: The crossroads of nationalist historiographies in sub-Saharan Africa and of the history of developmentalist attempts that characterise the European late colonial states, have left us with very incomplete images of important trajectories. In the seemingly more “liberal” large colonial empires—notably the French and British—sails were set by 1945 towards a policy of investment and economic change. Some of the scholarly debates question whether this investment was genuine or just a last resort to avoid (rapid) decolonisation; others put the emphasis on inadequate routines of development implemented in these territories, many of which have apparently been continued since decolonisation.In this context, we encounter a clear lack of understanding about how decisions made by individual actors on the administrative level interacted with the larger panorama of social conditions in colonial territories, and of the consequences that these interactions had for the paths towards decolonisation. For a smaller empire such as the Belgian colony of Congo-Leopoldville, these processes are still more obscure; and for the colonies ruled by authoritarian metropoles, as in the cases of territories under Spanish and Portuguese rule, stagnation and absence of change are often taken for granted. In other words, these territories, which were under the rule of metropoles regarded as rather weak in economic terms, are treated as unrepresentative of the broader, European movement towards change in colonial policies. However, the conditions of change towards economic and social modernisation in this latter group of empires, even when inhibited by lack of funding and weak professionalisation of the administration, are frequently very telling for the broader range of challenges that the late colonial states faced.

Abstract: The Swedish East India Company has been studied mainly from an economic standpoint, but throughout the eighteenth century its employees played a crucial role in Swedish knowledge production on China. This article studies travel writings, speeches, and eulogies by the employees of the Swedish East India Company, noting in which ways they produced knowledge on China, and discusses reasons for choosing these particular ways. The company employees' production of knowledge is found to have strong links with their constructions of masculinity. Consequently, this article discusses the political implications of a connection between masculinity and knowledge for men employed in a non-colonial East India Company from a militarily weak country, and the role that the perceived and presented knowledge of China and its inhabitants played in this intertwining of gender construction, natural history, and power.

Abstract: Even before signing the pact between Japan and Germany, Japanese musicians performed in the concert halls of the Third Reich. In particular, there was an active demand due to propagandistic performances such as German–Japanese concerts or concerts for German soldiers on the Eastern front or occupied territories. This study describes the activities of two “Japanese” conductors who became members of the Reich Chamber of Culture and performed with the Berliner Philharmonic orchestra: Ahn Ekitai (Iktae) from colonial Korea and Konoye Hidemaro, a high-ranking Japanese peer. Extracted from documents of the German–Japanese Society at the Federal Archives Koblenz (Germany), this article explores the cultural and political functions that these conductors faced in terms of German war propaganda and how their different musical compositions, both named “Etenraku”, related to propagandistic values. This essay further shows that Ahn, whom Koreans considered a patriot and fighter against Japanese colonial power in Europe for a long time, was active as a Japanese conductor in the Third Reich, calling Konoye's assertion that he was pursued by the Nazis into question.

Abstract: As the Portuguese settlement of Macau came to occupy an important position in the emerging global commercial web, it became a crossroads where peoples from disparate parts of the world—in particular, Portuguese and Chinese—came together to engage in a profitable trade. Historians have often treated Macau as a prototypical example of cross-cultural interaction and hybridity: a point where East and West converged and blended; an “Intercultural City,” in the words of one scholar. Yet, the notion of Macau as a place of intermingling and blending obscures some of the ways in which Macau's inhabitants did not quite “come together.” Here, I focus on the asymmetry in linguistic communication that developed in Macau: members of Macau's Portuguese mercantile elite did not become fluent in any of the Chinese dialects, and did not learn how to read or write the Chinese script, while a number of the Chinese who came to live in Macau—whether as merchants, tradesmen, labourers, servants, or slaves—became proficient in Portuguese. Drawing from a range of sources in Portuguese and Chinese, I argue that this asymmetry developed for several reasons, including the difficulty of the Chinese language, the Chinese government's approach to foreign relations and maritime, and the political and economic power of the Portuguese within their Lusophone enclave. I also consider how the Portuguese reliance on others for assistance with cross-cultural communication—most notably, Jesuit missionaries and Chinese jurubacas (interpreters)—shaped the evolution of the multicultural community.

Abstract: In 1914, most New Zealanders welcomed the opportunity to stand together with the British Empire. Historians have long recognised that for a small country the contribution to the war effort of pakeha New Zealanders was substantial. Much less well recognised is the contribution of Māoris who served at Gallipoli and on the western front. In the face of opposition from within the Māori community and from British High Command, a determined group of Māori leaders argued forcefully for sending Māoris into action. Many young Māori men responded with enthusiasm to the recruitment drive and the First Māori Battalion sailed to Egypt in February 1915. This paper explores the tensions that resonated within the Māori community around the recruitment of Māori men and argues that the debates were shaped by different understandings of nationhood. Māoris who opposed recruitment believed that volunteering to fight in a foreign war distracted Māoris from dealing with the difficulties in their own communities. Conversely those who argued for participation in the war believed that their contribution to the war would lead to utu (justice), and that only by including Māoris as soldiers in fighting units could all New Zealanders claim to belong to an authentic nation.

Abstract: This article examines some of the core holdings within the Archive for Contemporary Affairs at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Prominent amongst this material are the papers of the National Party (NP), the political party that formalised the structures of apartheid. Paying particular attention to the papers of what Hermann Giliomee has termed ‘The Last Afrikaner Leaders’ alongside recently acquired material concerning post-colonial politics, we argue for the importance of this archive for scholars studying Afrikaner nationalism, at both national and regional level, the rationales and discourses of apartheid and the history of the country more broadly.

Abstract: On 17 April 1946, seven Australian war crimes investigators left the military perimeter British troops were maintaining around the city of Batavia and travelled into an anarchic, lawless Javanese hinterland, rife with different Indonesian revolutionary militants fighting the Dutch and each other. As they entered the kampong of Tjaringin, north of Bogor, automatic rifle fire hit their car. Two men died immediately; a third was found days later in a nearby ditch, shot in the back of the head. Amid outrage in the Australian press, External Affairs Minister H. V Evatt announced he was sending an Australian judge, Richard Kirby, to investigate the killings. This article analyses Kirby's trip to Indonesia and his approach to the task of locating and bringing to trial the murderers.Kirby's task was a microcosm of the challenge the West faced in responding to the nationalist uprisings that convulsed postwar Asia. Those uprisings, at times marked by violent antiforeign sentiment, raised for Western nations the spectre of permanent instability and anarchy impeding their interests and influence: O.S.S. officer Peter Dewey's murder in Vietnam the year before had similarly encapsulated this issue for the United States. Yet by the end of the 1940s, Western policymakers had for the most part moved from supporting formal colonialism to supporting the formation of independent states run by Asian nationalists. Australia's support for the Indonesian Republic in its struggle against Dutch rule was an early example of this shift. It so happened that Kirby's 1946 Java mission coincided with a period of backtracking in Australia's progressive attitude to the Indonesian question: indeed, Kirby's minister at times expressed qualms with Kirby's approach.

Abstract: In Latin America, where British imperial expansion had left little administrative trace, Argentina was nonetheless profoundly affected by British investment and imported British technical expertise. Among the more modest examples of British expansionism in Argentina was the arrival, from 1865 onwards, of Welsh immigrants eager to establish a colony in Patagonia isolated from the seemingly unstoppable progress of Anglicisation by an overwhelmingly hegemonic Victorian England. By the time of the First World War, however, the Celtic character of the colony could no longer be taken for granted: Argentine government pressures had already meant that the Welsh-speaking colony was now more firmly integrated into the nation-building process. Friction which then developed between the Welsh community and the Argentine government acted as one of the push factors which sent Welsh Patagonians back to Wales and on to Australia, for example…To this process of integration the Great War added new pressures in the form of the question of loyalty to Britain during the conflict. Those who stayed in Patagonia during the war often expressed views which were pro-British and the Argentine province became a source of recruitment for the British armed services…Using a range of sources, this paper attempts to show that the Welshness of the Patagonian colonists had not destroyed their British patriotism: the latter survived and even came to the fore during the conflict of 1914-18.

Abstract: The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War seemed a timely occasion on which to call a meeting of leading international scholars to conduct a critical investigation into some lesser-known aspects of the relationship between the conflict and the British Empire. That the conference, entitled British Empire and the Great War: Colonial Societies/Cultural Responses, took place in Singapore, and was organised by a Northern Irish academic resident there and a Cypriot domiciled in Australia, again, seemed most relevant. The problematique of the conference focused on a decentralisation of sociocultural analysis, away from the more predictable metropolitan perspectives, to make way for an analysis of contrasts and complementarities of ideology throughout the geographical and ethnic extremes of both the “formal” and “informal” empire. From Singapore to Australia, Cyprus to Ireland, India to Canada, South Africa to Mesopotamia, New Zealand to Argentina, and around the rest of the British imperial world, further complexities and interlocking themes were addressed relating to an array of subjects including: imperial and colonial history, war and society, war and culture, art history, cultural studies, diaspora, loyalties/disloyalties, music history, photography, propaganda, education, pacifism, gender studies, class and race structures/relations. Of particular interest was how different strata and subsets of imperial society shaped and were shaped by the experience of total war; and how disparate societies and cultures—in all their manifestations and on their various “home fronts”—shaped and were shaped by it. The conference, in part, emanated from questions raised in an earlier study, London, Modernism and 1914, in which Michael Walsh tried to understand imperial and cultural responses to the outbreak of war at the very heart of the vortex (that is, within London). The results of this study, predictably, ruled out any chance of creating or establishing a single identity or unified response for a city, let alone a country, or empire. London’s response to war was as varied as the people who lived in it. That established, and bearing in mind that the strongest shock waves are not always felt at the epicentre, further investigation about cultural and intellectual responses, far from Whitehall and Downing Street, seemed essential. This seemed a crucial line of enquiry to understand (in what is now deemed somewhat oldfashioned terminology) the reciprocal relationship between the centre and the periphery, and the diverse cultures and societies that inhabited both.

Abstract: On November 15, 1865, the French inhabitants of New Caledonia gathered together with a number of the island's natives to celebrate the lighting of the lighthouse. It was scheduled to coincide with the saint day of the Empress Eugenie, and the imperial vision rang loudly through Governor Guillain's inaugural address that eveningIf, transporting ourselves in thought into the different regions of the civilized world, we examine the events transpiring there, the most magnificent panorama is unrobed before our eyes. Everywhere,—and this will be the glory of our epoch,—everywhere, great works are being executed to bring the peoples together, to multiply their relations, to prepare, in a word, that universal brotherhood, destined and reserved by Providence for future generations.Universal brotherhood may seem like a tall order for a lighthouse, but Guillain was a man who liked to dream big. He had arrived in 1862 as governor of New Caledonia and director of the prison France hoped to establish there, but he really envisioned himself as an enlightened technocrat engineering a perfect society on his unspoiled island paradise.

Abstract: On the outbreak of war, men from the Dominions were scattered across the British Empire. As each Dominion began recruiting their expeditionary forces at home, the issue arose whether these expatriates, especially those resident in the United Kingdom, should join the British Army or be able to enlist in their Dominion's force. Canada and New Zealand allowed recruiting for the CEF and NZEF in the UK. Many Anglophone White South Africans joined a “colonial” battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. The Australian Government refused to allow Australians in the UK to join the AIF, despite the repeated requests of the Australian expatriate community. This paper examines the questions of British and sub-Imperial Dominion identities as well as the practical policy considerations raised by this issue. It argues that there is some evidence of nascent Dominion nationalism—the Canadian High Commission in London issued what became known as “a Certificate of Canadian Citizenship” to expatriates— but that Dominion Governments generally based their decisions on this issue based on cost and domestic political considerations.

Abstract: In February, the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction (FEEGI) held its tenth biennial conference at Tulane University in New Orleans. Historians from across the United States, Canada, and Europe gathered for two days of panels organised around themes related to the early modern expansion of Europe and worldwide responses to that expansion. The FEEGI conference drew together scholars from across disciplines and from varied geographic and thematic fields. At this year’s gathering, a series of plenary panels included presentations by advanced graduate students, as well as junior and senior faculty. Presentation topics ranged from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century and focused on locales from the harbour of Manila to the mountain towns of Northern Mexico and the Council chambers of Whitehall. The conference opened with a panel titled “Defining the Sea” chaired by Giancarlo Casale (University of Minnesota). This session included three papers, which shared a focus on early modern efforts to define oceanic boundaries. Ernesto Bassi (Cornell University) began with a paper that explored the nation-making efforts of mid-nineteenth-century Colombian politician-geographers. Bassi explored Columbian political leaders’ use of maps and mapping to “decaribbeanize” the nascent republic by arguing against European colonialism while fashioning a distinctly Euro-Atlantic national profile. Kurt Gingrich (Radford University) followed Bassi and delivered a paper about the environmental descriptions of Elizabethan navigator John Davis. He argued for the importance of mastery of the environment in early empire building. The first panel concluded with a paper by Karin Velez (Macalester College) that sought to “stretch” the Mediterranean World framework of Fernand Braudel through an examination of the flying Holy House of Loreto. Tracing the extra-Mediterranean journeys of the Catholic relic, Velez presented a framework for the cultural comparison of Italian, Slavic, French, and Native American actors. The second panel (FEEGI conference panels are, by design, never concurrent) was chaired by Carla Gardina Pestana (University of California, Los Angeles) and focused on “Religious Practices.” Matthew Brennan (Tulane University) began with a paper that traced the trans-Atlantic history of the religious practice of gris-gris in Senegambia and colonial Louisiana. Brennan recognised a “trans-ethnic diaspora”

Abstract: The Allied expedition to Salonika was a controversial campaign of the First World War that diverted French and British resources away from the Western Front. To sustain this expedition without depleting existing forces, the Colonial Office approached the High Commissioners of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and requested that each dominion consider raising a Serbian military contingent for service in Salonika. In the decades preceding the outbreak of war, South Slavs had settled in each of the dominions and the War Office hoped to exploit nationalist aspirations for a pan-Slavic state and mobilise South Slavs in the dominions. In raising these contingents, dominion governments weighed between fulfilling a demand of the Imperial war effort and jeopardising domestic stability by empowering a culturally-distinct minority that was the object of public paranoia. This article will examine how the legal status of South Slavs changed in the three dominions as a result of these recruiting efforts along with the conditions under which South Slavs were able to volunteer for service in Salonika. A comparative approach reveals how Southern Slavs were defined and how they defined themselves as they navigated the categories of enemy aliens, friendly allies, and subjects of the British Empire.

Abstract: In the first week of December 2013, Fred Cooper was in Leiden to participate in the conference “South Asia and the long 1930s: appropriations and afterlives.” We caught him on the day that he was giving a public lecture on his current work, entitled Beyond Empire: France and French Africa in the Post-World War II Context. The interview took place in the chilly medieval dungeons of Leiden, now one of the more fancy conference locations of the university in the historic city centre. Fred Cooper is well known for his work on African history and his studies of colonialism and empire.

Abstract: it through cartography, roads, and bridges. It shows how the British were met with violent resistance while seeking to impose a geography that did not fit with indigenous ideas. It is interesting to think about this in the context of modern Sri Lanka. Few infrastructure improvements were made during the civil war, but today new roads are being constructed. For example, the trip from Colombo to Galle has been halved but at the expense of the beauty of the old coastal road. “Medicine” looks at smallpox, vaccinations, jungle fever, and public health through the lens of transition from Kandy kings to the colonial state. “Publics” is about the apparatus of the colonial state—the legislature—and the emergence of a public sphere, including schools and the press. As these chapter keywords show, a broad variety of topics are all subservient to the main theme of the book: the process of British colonialism in Sri Lanka and the role of indigenous traditions in this process. This selection and their discussion is not encyclopaedic, which would have made it unfocused and overwhelming, rather it is a convincing selection of topics. Sivasundaram has extensively used archives in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sri Lanka in both English and Sinhala so that both coloniser and colonised are convincingly detailed. His knowledge of Lankan sources gives a convincing ring to his arguments. He writes that he has used parts of the book in undergraduate and graduate teaching and the results of these test runs have produced a text not dependant on jargon and of unusual clarity despite the specialised subject matter. Each chapter is bookended with an introduction and conclusion that elucidate the theoretical issues and draw links between. A helpful glossary and well-selected illustrations enhance the accessibility of the text. Despite this care, two important terms that pepper the text could have used more definition. The first, paradoxically enough, is the title, which is used as a verb throughout the text, but is never clearly defined. By context one can assume that it refers to the isolation of Sri Lanka in historiography, a sort of the extension of the partitioning in India. It is only in the conclusion that we find that “the British sought to make this small territory a unit in the Indian Ocean” (322) and that Sivrasundaram believes that “it is imperative to move beyond the island as a fundamental unit of historical study (323).” The other is the very loaded word, orientalist. This is less problematic, because it is clear that this word is used in the pre-Said sense of a westerner interested in the orient. But until that determination is made, one is unsure of the implications of this description. Sivasundarum’s work is not so much revisionist but rather challenges the lazy generalisations that we tend rely upon for historical analysis. While few of us see things in the stark dichotomies that he emphasises—kingdom/colonial state, indigenous/colonial, highland/ lowland, etc.—it is useful to be challenged. If it is not the revolutionary new paradigm for the study of the Indian Ocean, it is nevertheless a fine study that provides rich material not just for historians of Sri Lanka, but for comparison on the manifestations of colonialism from a variety of viewpoints.

Abstract: This article explores the private trade networks of English East India Company merchants on the west coast of India during the first half of the eighteenth century. Existing studies of English private trade in the Indian Ocean have almost exclusively focused on India's eastern seaboard, the Coromandel Coast and the Bay of Bengal regions. This article argues that looking at private trade from the perspective of the western Indian Ocean provides a different picture of this important branch of European trade. It uses EIC records and merchants' private papers to argue against recent metropolitan-centred approaches to English private trade, instead emphasising the importance of more localised political and economic contexts, within the Indian Ocean world, for shaping the conduct and success of this commerce.