Flagships of imperialism

Flagships of imperialism
Author: Freda Harcourt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2013-07-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847796524

Flagships of Imperialism is the first scholarly monograph on the history of the P&O shipping company, and the first history of P&O to pay due attention to the context of nineteenth century imperial politics which so significantly shaped the company’s development. Based chiefly on unpublished material from the P&O archives and the National Archives, and on contemporary official publications, the book covers the crucial period from the company’s origins to 1867. After presenting new findings about the company’s origins in the Irish transport industry, the book charts the extension of the founders’ interests from the Iberian peninsula to the Mediterranean, India, China and Australia. In so doing it deals with the development of the necessary financial infrastructure for P&O’s operations; the founders’ attitudes to technical advances; the shareholding base; the company’s involvement in the opium trade, and with its acquisition of mail, Admiralty and other government contracts. It was the P&O’s status as a government contractor which, above all else, implicated its fortunes in the wider politics of empire, as illustrated by the book's concluding account of the company’s rescue from the edge of a financial precipice by the award of a new government mail contract prompted, among other things, by the Abyssinian expedition of 1867. Flagships of Imperialism will be of interest to transport and company historians and to historians of the British empire alike, as well as to anyone interested in the history of British ships and shipping in the nineteenth century.

Flagships of Imperialism

Flagships of Imperialism
Author: Freda Harcourt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2006-07-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781847791450

The first scholarly monograph on the history of the P&O shipping company, which many would argue was the truly central and iconic shipping line of empire. It is also the first history of P&O to pay due attention to the political context - the politics of the British Empire - which shaped the company's development.

Global Histories of Work

Global Histories of Work
Author: Andreas Eckert
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110434466

Global Histories of Work is the first title in the new series "Work in Global and Historical Perspective". This collection of selected articles written by leading scholars in different disciplines provides both an introduction and numerous insights into themes, debates and methods of Global Labour History as they have been developed over the last years. The contributions to the volume discuss crucial historiographical developments; present different professions that have gained new attention in the context of an emerging Global Labour History; critically engage the boundaries of "free" labour and the ambiguities contained in this concept; and take up and historicize current debates about "informal labour". Global Histories of Work will familiarize readers with a burgeoning fi eld of high academic, social, and political relevance.

Maritime Empires

Maritime Empires
Author: National Maritime Museum (Great Britain)
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2004
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781843830764

Britain's overseas Empire pre-eminently involved the sea. In a two-way process, ships carried travellers and explorers, trade goods, migrants to new lands, soldiers to fight wars and garrison colonies, and also ideas and plants that would find fertile minds and soils in other lands. These essays, deriving from a National Maritime Museum (London) conference, provide a wide-ranging and comprehensive picture of the activities of maritime empire. They discuss a variety of issues: maritime trades, among them the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Honduran mahogany for shipping to Britain, the movement of horses across the vast reaches of Asia and the Indian Ocean; the impact of new technologies as Empire expanded in the nineteenth century; the sailors who manned the ships, the settlers who moved overseas, and the major ports of the Imperial world; plus the role of the navy in hydrographic survey. Published in association with the National Maritime Museum. DAVID KILLINGRAY is Emeritus Professor of Modern History, Goldsmiths College London; MARGARETTE LINCOLN and NIGEL RIGBY are in the research department of the National Maritime Museum.

Writing imperial histories

Writing imperial histories
Author: Andrew S. Thompson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2016-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 152611254X

This book appraises the critical contribution of the Studies in Imperialism series to the writing of imperial histories as the series passes its 100th publication. The volume brings together some of the most distinguished scholars writing today to explore the major intellectual trends in Imperial history, with a particular focus on the cultural readings of empire that have flourished over the last generation. When the Studies in Imperialism series was founded, the discipline of Imperial history was at what was probably its lowest ebb. A quarter of a century on, there has been a tremendous broadening of the scope of what the study of empire encompasses. Essays in the volume consider ways in which the series and the wider historiography have sought to reconnect British and imperial histories; to lay bare the cultural expressions and registers of colonial power; and to explore the variety of experiences the home population derived from the empire.

From Jack Tar to Union Jack

From Jack Tar to Union Jack
Author: Mary A. Conley
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526117657

Jack Tar to Union Jack examines the intersection between empire, navy, and manhood in British society from 1870 to 1918. Through analysis of sources that include courts-martial cases, sailors’ own writings, and the HMS Pinafore, Conley charts new depictions of naval manhood during the Age of Empire, a period which witnessed the radical transformation of the navy, the intensification of imperial competition, the democratisation of British society, and the advent of mass culture. Jack Tar to Union Jack argues that popular representations of naval men increasingly reflected and informed imperial masculine ideals in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Conley shows how the British Bluejacket as both patriotic defender and dutiful husband and father stood in sharp contrast to the stereotypic image of the brave but bawdy tar of the Georgian navy. This book will be essential reading for students of British imperial history, naval and military history, and gender studies.

Missionaries and their medicine

Missionaries and their medicine
Author: David Hardiman
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 152611917X

Missionaries and their medicine is a lucid and enthralling study of the encounter between Christian missionaries and an Indian tribal community, the Bhils, in the period 1880 to 1964. The study is informed by a deep knowledge of the people amongst whom the missionaries worked, the author having lived for extensive periods in the tribal tracts of western India. He argues that the Bhils were never the passive objects of missionary attention and that they created for themselves their own form of ‘Christian modernity.’ The book provides a major intervention in the history of colonial medicine, as Hardiman argues that missionary medicine had a specific quality of its own – which he describes and analyses in detail – and that in most cases it was preferred to the medicine of colonial states. He also examines the period of transition to Indian independence, which was a highly fraught and uncertain process for the missionaries.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics
Author: Jed Z. Buchwald
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 956
Release: 2013-10-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 019151019X

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics brings together cutting-edge writing by more than twenty leading authorities on the history of physics from the seventeenth century to the present day. By presenting a wide diversity of studies in a single volume, it provides authoritative introductions to scholarly contributions that have tended to be dispersed in journals and books not easily accessible to the general reader. While the core thread remains the theories and experimental practices of physics, the Handbook contains chapters on other dimensions that have their place in any rounded history. These include the role of lecturing and textbooks in the communication of knowledge, the contribution of instrument-makers and instrument-making companies in providing for the needs of both research and lecture demonstrations, and the growing importance of the many interfaces between academic physics, industry, and the military.

Capitalism and the Sea

Capitalism and the Sea
Author: Liam Campling
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2021-01-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1784785261

What keeps capitalism afloat? The global ocean has through the centuries served as a trade route, strategic space, fish bank and supply chain for the modern capitalist economy. While sea beds are drilled for their fossil fuels and minerals, and coastlines developed for real estate and leisure, the oceans continue to absorb the toxic discharges of our carbon civilization - warming, expanding, and acidifying the blue water part of the planet in ways that will bring unpredictable but irreversible consequences for the rest of the biosphere. In this bold and radical new book, Campling and Colás analyze these and other sea-related phenomena through a historical and geographical lens. In successive chapters dealing with the political economy, ecology and geopolitics of the sea, the authors argue that the earth's geographical separation into land and sea has significant consequences for capitalist development. The distinctive features of this mode of production continuously seek to transcend the land-sea binary in an incessant quest for profit, engendering new alignments of sovereignty, exploitation and appropriation in the capture and coding of maritime spaces and resources.

The Routledge History of Western Empires

The Routledge History of Western Empires
Author: Robert Aldrich
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 798
Release: 2013-12-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 131799986X

The Routledge History of Western Empires is an all new volume focusing on the history of Western Empires in a comparative and thematic perspective. Comprising of thirty-three original chapters arranged in eight thematic sections, the book explores European overseas expansion from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Decolonisation. Studies by both well-known historians and new scholars offer fresh, accessible perspectives on a multitude of themes ranging from colonialism in the Arctic to the scramble for the coral sea, from attitudes to the environment in the East Indies to plans for colonial settlement in Australasia. Chapters examine colonial attitudes towards poisonous animals and the history of colonial medicine, evangelisaton in Africa and Oceania, colonial recreation in the tropics and the tragedy of the slave trade. The Routledge History of Western Empires ranges over five centuries and crosses continents and oceans highlighting transnational and cross-cultural links in the imperial world and underscoring connections between colonial history and world history. Through lively and engaging case studies, contributors not only weigh in on historiographical debates on themes such as human rights, religion and empire, and the ‘taproots’ of imperialism, but also illustrate the various approaches to the writing of colonial history. A vital contribution to the field.