This chapter investigates Anthony Martin Fernando's life of self-imposed exile and his overseas protests concerning the failure of British justice in Australia. From his early adulthood in the 1880s until his death in 1949, Fernando sought to bring international attention to Aboriginal rights. Fernando was first among the Aboriginal people personally engaged in this transnational critique of the Empire. Fernando explained, while working as a young railwayman he had witnessed the murder of an Aboriginal man and attempted to give evidence against the two white men accused of the crime. Fernando addressed British authorities through the American consul in Vienna. In his defence, Fernando benefited from the long-standing imperial trope of the civilised black man. Fernando's claims about white brutality could not have been more pertinent than in the sesquicentennial year of 1938.

Critical theory's epistemological arguments were marshalled in a vehement critique of positivism, which marked its claims as a reaction against rational normativity, or as the new empiricist epistemology safeguarding scientific orthodoxy. This chapter explores the relevant exchange of arguments between critical theorists and positivists. It discusses the analysis of the three major thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School challenged instrumentality whereby human beings become mere instruments along the lines set out by modern science. In order to deal with what constitutes science, epistemologically speaking, critical theory tackles the problem of scientific laws. The answer remains straightforward: whereas natural sciences facilitate the formation of scientific laws, it is rather unfeasible to expect the same degree of certainty in the humanities and social sciences. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

Historians of imperialism have paid little attention to the Japanese experience. This chapter outlines the nature of the Japanese community in Shanghai and its major characteristics. It examines its major organisations and how they shaped a community life. The chapter explores the major activities and challenges of the Japanese residents. Shanghai's reputation as a city of opportunities must have circulated broadly in Japan and the city served as a magnet for a domestic population facing the scarcities of a rigorous war economy. Of all the foreign communities in Shanghai, and probably in China, the Japanese were beyond any doubt the most organised and regulated. Two major factors may explain this phenomenon: the strong involvement of the state in the control of its subjects, and the overreaction of Japanese residents to Chinese nationalism.

Introduced by the ‘junk’ and beat aesthetics in the late 1950s, the figure of the dropout or slacker served as a counter-cultural model for artists concerned with precariousness, and took on various forms later in that decade. Celebrating leisure and laziness as a challenge to the capitalist work ethic, artists such as Tom Marioni, as well as groups such as Fluxus or ‘funk’ artists on the West Coast, appeared as concerned with their daily experiences as with creating any specific artwork, thus pursuing an ‘art of living’, as Fluxus artist Robert Filliou called it. Other artists in the 1960s questioned the value of work by developing what Allan Kaprow called ‘useless work’ – types of labour that involve effort, but yield no lasting product or outcome. While such ‘good-for-nothing’ figures pursued the Zen ideal of wu-shih or ‘nothing special’ that had inspired both junk practices and ‘borderline’ art in the early 1960s, other artists looked for inspiration to the ‘adversity’ of some of the poorest members of society (in the case of Hélio Oiticica).

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides the neglected forces of nation; empire and race exerted a far more profound influence upon Labour politics in Britain and Australia between 1900 and 2010 than is suggested in the relevant literature. It discusses the questions of nation; empire and race were at the heart of the New Commonwealth, formed in 1901. The Australian labour movement, especially the precocious Australian Labour Party (ALP), played a major role in shaping the characteristics and early development of the New Commonwealth. The book explains Labour's poor overall electoral performance in Australia and its more mixed record in Britain in terms of a combination of 'traditional', 'revisionist', neglected and new factors. Between 1996-97 and 2007 the fortunes of the ALP and British Labour Party (BLP) were reversed.

Victorian missionaries seldom stopped to enquire what structural function the practices they objected to so often performed in ensuring the cohesion of traditional societies. Mission work in Africa grew rapidly from the 1850s. From the start, the issue of polygyny was of central importance, and it remained at the heart of the battle for an African Christianity. Insistence on monogamy forms a long, difficult backdrop to the missionary penetration of Africa. Missionaries the world over, whether Catholic or Protestant, have always consistently targeted anal intercourse as one of the first traditional practices to be eliminated. For the churches, what happened in Buganda in the 1880s was a chastening experience. Systematic teaching by missionaries in Kenya against clitoridectomy began in 1906, by the controllers of the CSM hospital in Kikuyu, notably by Dr J. W. Arthur, who became head of the mission station there.

French military thinking during the interwar years was characterised by defensive planning and few offensive strategies were developed. This chapter examines the how the French prepared for war, moving from macro to micro. It analyses preparations for war generally and then children's expectations of war during the interwar period. Visions of future war do not seem to have sparked memorable activity, or inspired fear or anxiety. Oral transmission within the family was important in developing children's understanding of past war. War had a constant presence in children's early lives. 'Lurid atrocity tales' of mutilation and murder were widespread and transmitted across the generations, creating real Germanophobia. Reverberations from the Great War created an understanding of what war was. Future war had little presence in the children's lives, then, and past war painted an outmoded picture. Conflicts unfolding in the present brought children an understanding of modern war fare.

Museums in Canada have a longer, though somewhat chequered, history than elsewhere in the British Empire. This chapter examines the early and often tentative beginnings of Canadian museums while the next surveys the emergence of the modern, and rather different, museums in Toronto and Victoria. In 1851, the Canadian Institute was incorporated in Toronto, and it was to be important in the founding of the Ontario Provincial Museum. If the origins of museums throughout eastern Canada represent a number of different streams, those in Ontario clearly illustrate the educational, didactic, and multi-disciplinary forces which fed into the major development of the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Among these, the emergence of a local museum in Elora some sixty miles due west of Toronto is highly significant. This museum is inseparably connected with the extraordinary auto-didact David Boyle.

An essential part of the politics of the Cold War, the Right once again tarred the mainstream labour movement as subscribing to the 'alien', 'extreme' and 'totalitarian' doctrine of socialism. The post-war Australian economy was booming, largely on the back of rapidly expanding exports. The Australian Labour Party's (ALP's) proposals for bank nationalisation, petrol rationing and other forms of 'bureaucratic controls' were all portrayed as steps 'further towards the development of a totalitarian state'. The politics of Cold War loyalism were also an important part of Britain's post-war history. Britain Catholics were also prominent among labour-movement anti-communists; they were far less likely to attempt to smear Labour's mainstream leaders than were their counterparts in Australia. Ernes Bevin, Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison saw possession of an independent nuclear deterrent as 'commensurate with Britain's great power status and moral influence in the world'.

This chapter presents the exchange of opinions between Georg Lukács and his student István Mészáros on the aesthetic issues of the cinema. These aesthetic issues include the layers and nature of film theory; the question of the public nature of the film; how film becomes art; the audio-visual character of the film; film reflection; phenomenon and substance in film; acceleration and slow motion; film and arts; the artistic language of the film; the form of the screen; theatricality; the subjectivity and objectivity of the film; artistic unity; and the problems of cinematographic drammaturgy.