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This chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about imperial citizenship in the British Empire. This volume examines how imperial ideologues used the language of imperial citizenship as part of broader discourses concerning the purpose, the constitution, and the future of Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first section provides an exegesis of the theoretical underpinnings of various conservative arguments for the creation of an imperial citizenship and the second offers an examination of the applicability of such abstract constructions in practice through case studies of the citizenship issues of imperial naturalisation, immigration and emigration. This volume also analyzes the views of several British national figures on imperialist citizenship, including Lionel Curtis, John Buchan and Arnold White.

This chapter analyses the ideas of Lionel Curtis, co-founder of the imperial pressure group the Round Table, concerning imperial citizenship. Curtis' ideas concerning imperial citizenship point to one of the central strands of the imperial thought web—the idea of union consecrated in an imperial citizenship. He believed that imperial federation held the key to world peace and provided the buttress of civilization. Though Curtis struggled to reconcile the existence of multiple loyalties within the Empire with the formation of a unified imperial state, his ideas were influential in framing the political evolution of Empire in the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps of greatest significance was his concept of dyarchy, which epitomized the British style of informal Empire.

This chapter examines the view of English author Richard Jebb on imperial citizenship. Unlike Lionel Curtis and John Buchan, Jebb remained convinced that Britain must continue to be the centre of the Empire and he envisioned the Empire less as a federation and more as a confederation. He also lobbied for a greater regard for colonial nationalism as the buttress of imperial unity, particularly through a common imperial naturalisation process, and those of ‘colonial autonomy’. This chapter also comments on Jebb's Studies in Colonial Nationalism and suggests that he was a colonial nationalist.

This chapter discusses the failure of imperial citizenship in Britain. The efforts of late Victorian and Edwardian imperial ideologues to articulate a concept of citizenship which could unite Britons at home and in the Empire ended in frustration because broader the public was not convinced of the necessity of a clearly defined imperial citizenship. All the imperial ideologues considered in this volume saw the social idea of citizenship as more important than the political idea and this was not acceptable to most Britons. It offended the prevalent belief in the superiority of the British race and it rejected the consensual notion of identity upon which contemporary ideas of citizenship were based.

This chapter analyses the views of English social worker Thomas Sedgwick on imperial citizenship. Sedgwick believed that emigration was a case of imperial citizenship at work and he advocated for the so-called practical imperialism. However, an analysis of Sedgwick's assisted emigration work demonstrated that the social imperialist programme of fostering a common imperial citizenship based upon a social ideal of ‘Britishness’ proved no more successful than did the broad church approach of Richard Jebb or John Buchan, the ethnic ‘whiteness’ of Arnold White, or the centralist political approach of Lionel Curtis.

This chapter examines the views of John Buchan, Governor-General of Canada from 1935 to 1940, concerning imperial citizenship. Buchan's imperial outlook was that of a progressive conservative with a cosmopolitan sympathy held back, but only just, by his respect for tradition and stability. His vision was of a broad-minded notion of Empire based upon morality, values and an understated fatalism. Unlike Lionel Curtis, Buchan was more interested in fostering the shared Britannic identity he believed must necessarily underpin any firm imperial citizenship. This chapter also analyses Buchan's work on imperialism A Lodge in the Wilderness.

This chapter analyses the views of English journalist Arnold White on imperial citizenship. White believed that Empire was just fine as it was, except for those instances when it could benefit from becoming more like it had been. He epitomized imperialism at its most parochial. He saw the Empire as not just a figurative but also a literal extension of England and his desire to improve the nation's health and efficiency and to promote patriotism and loyalty applied equally to both England and the Empire. Thus, his notion of imperial citizenship was the same as his notion of domestic citizenship. However, there is one aspect of White's thought on English citizenship that did incorporate the Empire: his concern over national efficiency, specifically a fear of moral and physical degeneracy.

Chapter three examines how colonial settlers imagined their relationships with a British ‘homeland’ and a larger British world. By examining the robust English-language print cultures in South Africa and New Zealand, the chapter explores how colonial settlers used the forum of the royal tour to self-fashion communal mythologies and identities in the languages of Britishness and imperial citizenship not only in individual colonies – in New Zealand or the Cape Colony – but also in provincial and urban cores – in the Eastern Cape or Dunedin, for instance. While the royal tours were used by colonial officials and local elites as instruments of propaganda and social control, colonial subjects in the empire often used the languages of Britishness and imperial citizenship to protest injustices, whether local or imperial, or to challenge racial or ethnic determinism.

Vergil consistently brings together the monument and festival at significant points in the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid. Representative passages from each oeuvre show that Vergil moves his reader through a simple dichotomy between writing and song to a more nuanced approach to the interrelation of these media. Ecphrasis of art works in the Aeneid in particular allows for the exploration of questions of fixity and perpetuity that other poets explore more directly through the language of writing. Although the ability to interpret the various media is an important aspect of imperial citizenship, Vergil does not offer a successful model for achieving this goal.

Chapter four explores how a modern politics and mass culture were mobilised by Western-educated respectables of colour in southern Africa and the British Raj to make claim on Britishness and imperial citizenship. In particular, it explores how historical actors such as Francis Z.S. Peregrino, Viswanath Narayan Mandalik, John Tengo Jabavu, and Mohandas Gandhi, participated in the networks of a British imperial world and in the making of a British imperial culture. Through the circuits of empire, respectables of colour came to identify themselves as members of a global community of ‘natives’ and Britishers and invested their notions of respectability in the promises of an imperial citizenship. Using the rich resources of independent African and South Asian newspapers, which covered and editorialised the royal tours with enthusiasm and at length, the chapter examines how South African and South Asian respectables claimed a more genuine understanding of British constitutionalism than the governments in Cape Town or Calcutta and through this understanding advocated a non-racial respectable status and an imperial citizenship.

This chapter examines Indian challenges to US and British imperial immigration laws beginning in 1910, when Indians from the Philippines began sailing into Seattle and San Francisco, demanding entry by claiming that they had traveled from one part of the “United States” to another. A few years later, over 300 Indians on board the Komagata Maru were denied entry to Vancouver after chartering their own ship in Hong Kong to circumvent restrictive Canadian immigration laws. By seeking entry to the US mainland and Canada from imperial territories, Indians exploited loopholes in US and British imperial immigration policies and argued that their admission to these imperial outposts meant that they were legally entitled to move freely within each empire. In so doing, they attracted further scrutiny from US, Canadian, and British officials, who argued that Indians were challenging and exploiting immigration policies to advance radical agendas.

This chapter provides a broad imperial history for understanding Lord Kitchener’s claim “London is the place for me” and the formation of postcolonial Black Britain within the context of post-emancipation Caribbean history. It is clear that Kitchener and his fellow Windrush passengers arrived with a sense of belonging and attachment to Britain. Using Jamaica as a focal point, this chapter surveys some of the ways in which people of African descent articulated political discourses about imperial citizenship that drew no distinct boundaries between blackness and Britishness. In doing so, it links the claims of citizenship and belonging that Afro-Caribbean migrants made in postwar Britain to an imperial history of contested ideas about race and what it meant to be a British subject/citizen.

The final chapter examines the endpoint of a Customs career. The circumstances in which employees left the Service, by resignation, illness, death, retirement or dismissal, are telling of the wide range of successes and failures that characterised colonial careers. Particular attention is paid to misconduct and corruption among the foreign staff, which threatened to discredit the Customs's legitimising myth that foreign employees provided a model of virtuous official behaviour sorely lacking in the Chinese bureaucracy. By exploring the post-Customs lives and destinations of foreign employees, part two of this chapter considers the question of national belonging for expatriates in the empire world. Drawing on the concept of imperial citizenship, this chapter demonstrates that the sentimental desire to return home was often supplanted by the practical rewards of life in the colonies.

Italy joined the Allies in sending troops to occupy the defeated Ottoman Empire; a detachment went to Constantinople while a larger Expeditionary Force, commanded from the Dodecanese islands, moved into Antalya and the surrounding region where Italy hoped to create a lasting Eastern Mediterranean sphere of influence or even perhaps a League of Nations Mandate. Ultimately, the Treaty of Sèvres was a disappointment, offering no guarantees in Asia Minor; since Italy was both unwilling and unable to fight against Atatürk’s forces to secure its goals in Turkey, it was forced to withdraw altogether by 1923, though it kept hold of the Dodecanese. In Libya, having lost functional control of the interior, Italy had few options but to concede considerable power to Sanussiya brotherhood and others. It also granted local constitutions in 1919, creating a new form of colonial citizenship there. Far from expanding it, the war had left Italy’s empire weakened.