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This book collects eleven original essays in the cultural history of the British Empire since the eighteenth century. It is geographically capacious, taking in the United Kingdom, India, West Africa, Hong Kong, and Australia, as well as sites of informal British influence such as the Ottoman Empire and southern China. The book considers the ways in which British culture circulated within what John Darwin has called the British “world system”. In this, the book builds on existing imperial scholarship while innovating in several ways: it focuses on the movement of ideas and cultural praxis, whereas Darwin has focused mostly on imperial structures —financial, demographic, and military. The book examines the transmission, reception, and adaptation of British culture in the Metropole, the empire and informal colonial spaces, whereas many recent scholars have considered British imperial influence on the Metropole alone. It examines Britain's Atlantic and Asian imperial experiences from the eighteenth to the twentieth century together. Through focusing on political ideology, literary movements, material culture, marriage, and the construction of national identities, the essays demonstrate the salience of culture in making a “British World”.

Brexit is likely to lead to the largest shift in Britain’s economic orientation in living memory. Some have argued that leaving the EU will enable Britain to revive markets in Commonwealth countries with which it has long-standing historical ties. Their opponents argue that such claims are based on forms of imperial nostalgia which ignore the often uncomfortable historical trade relations between Britain and these countries, as well as the UK’s historical role as a global, rather than chiefly imperial, economy. This book explores how efforts to promote a ‘British World’ system, centred on promoting trade between Britain and the Dominions, grew and declined in influence between the 1880s and 1970s. At the beginning of the twentieth century many people from London, to Sydney, Auckland, and Toronto considered themselves to belong to culturally British nations. British politicians and business leaders invested significant resources in promoting trade with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa out of a perception that these were great markets of the future. However, ideas about promoting trade between ‘British’ peoples were racially exclusive. From the 1920s onwards colonized and decolonizing populations questioned and challenged the bases of British World networks, making use of alternative forms of international collaboration promoted firstly by the League of Nations and then by the United Nations. Schemes for imperial collaboration amongst ethnically ‘British’ peoples were hollowed out by the actions of a variety of political and business leaders across Asia and Africa who reshaped the functions and identity of the Commonwealth.

Wives not Slaves reconstructs the stories of wives who fled their husbands between the mid-1600s and early 1800s, comparing their plight with that of other runaway dependents. The book is framed by the story of a colonial American couple who advertised their marital difficulties in the 1762 New Hampshire Gazette. After his wife Eunice left him, John Davis placed an “elopement” notice that resembled newspaper ads about runaway slaves. John warned the public against “entertaining her or harbouring her. . . or giving her credit.” Eunice defiantly replied, “If I am your wife, I am not your slave.” With this pointed but problematic analogy, Eunice connected her individual challenge to her husband’s authority with broader critiques of patriarchal power found in the politics, religion, and literature of the British Atlantic world. This book uses such case studies to explore the links between local justice, the emerging press, and transatlantic political debates about marriage, slavery, and imperial power. It examines English Civil War-era conflicts over marriage and divorce, which invoked supposedly ancient patriarchal ideas to defend monarchy and justify a novel commitment to colonial racial slavery. The book traces the relationship between the distress of ordinary households, domestic unrest, and political unrest through the era of American revolution. It documents the social changes imagined by eighteenth-century revolutionaries, illuminating the politics that determined which patriarchal forms and customs the new American nation would—and would not—abolish. Claims about modern progress away from timeless patriarchal traditions maintained “patriarchal equilibrium” in domestic law.

This book is a cultural and transnational history of modern procedural reform in the Westminster parliamentary system. The book centres on the nineteenth-century emergence of a desire to modernize and make more efficient the procedural rules of parliamentary law-making. Contrary to existing interpretations, which see that history as a product of transformations in political structure and practice, this book demonstrates how the evolution of Parliament’s rules was structured by transformations within the wider culture of time. The spread of an increasingly rigorous time discipline in concert with a growing consciousness of being modern, this book argues, worked to progressively erode the legitimacy of the historically developed rules of parliamentary debate and law-making while simultaneously implanting new ways of judging the effectiveness of parliamentary institutions. By the 1880s, this process had transformed efficiency into the ultimate criterion of parliamentary effectiveness. Using the conceptual framework of the British World, the book then demonstrates how this new understanding of parliamentary effectiveness was exported to the colonies of settlement through a series of communicative networks and provided colonial parliamentarians with the ability to imagine the inefficiencies of their own legislatures as part of a larger transnational problem.

After 1600, English emigration became one of Europe's most significant population movements. Yet compared to what has been written about the migration of Scots and Irish, relatively little energy has been expended on the numerically more significant English flows. Whilst the Scottish, Irish, German, Italian, Jewish and Black Diasporas are well known and much studied, there is virtual silence on the English. Why, then, is there no English Diaspora? Why has little been said about the English other than to map their main emigration flows? Did the English simply disappear into the host population? Or were they so fundamental, and foundational, to the Anglophone, Protestant cultures of the evolving British World that they could not be distinguished in the way Catholic Irish or continental Europeans were? With contributions from the UK, Europe North America and Australasia that examine themes as wide–ranging as Yorkshire societies in New Zealand and St George's societies in Montreal, to Anglo–Saxonism in the Atlantic World and the English Diaspora of the sixteenth century, this collection explores these and related key issues about the nature and character of English identity during the creation of the cultures of the wider British World. It does not do so uncritically. Several of the authors deal with and accept the invisibility of the English, while others take the opposite view. The result is a collection that combines reaffirmations of some existing ideas with empirical research, and new conceptualisations.