This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book begins with an examination of the nature of sexuality and of its influence on individuals, taking as examples those with some connection with the empire. It assesses the extent to which an understanding of sexual issues may enhance our perception of race relations in the British empire. The book focuses upon the attitudes and activities of the men who ran the empire. Repression of the sexual instincts is closely linked to 'sublimation', the psychoanalytic concept most commonly employed by historians. In order to understand the sexual aspects of the history of the British empire, it is essential that the historian should have some grasp, basic, of the dynamics of human sexuality as revealed in the work of sexologists and psychoanalysts.

In a study of Chinese medical missions, John R. Stanley has argued that from the early years of the twentieth century, medical missionaries refused increasingly to act as jack-of-all-trades. Missionaries were, in future, to be the bearers of medical modernity to the 'underdeveloped'. The missionaries could project themselves as being in tune with the nation-building and developmental priorities of the new India. Although the missionary project in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been driven by a desire to save souls for Christ, it had been justified also for its 'civilising' effect. In 1946, the mission lost its only Bhil doctor when Daniel Christian established a private practice in Lusadiya. Margaret Johnson looked after the dispensary at Biladiya for a few months after that, before taking charge of the hospital at Lusadiya from Daniel Christian in June 1942.

The case of jute provides some unexpected insights into the impact of the end of empire on Scotland. The strange case of jute brings out some paradoxical dimensions to Scotland's relationship with England and the empire in the twentieth century. For the jute industry owes its inception to Dundee, and for those capitalists engaged in Bengal to make possible, by their subscription, the completion of the Institution where jute workers are trained would be a peculiarly graceful and appropriate act. The Scottish workers who went out to the Calcutta mills were enmeshed in the empire. The twin impact of the Depression and increased output in Calcutta put enormous pressure on the Scottish manufacturers. The Dundee jute industry was like the canary in the coal mine, its death showed what would happen when British manufacturers were faced with Asian competition.

Sir Francis Younghusband, aligned the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) prominently with aviation and aimed to interest the British public in quick communication by air. Glimpses of a future programme of organised civil aviation in the British Empire were reaching geography teachers, the reading public, scientists and professionals working in transport. The RGS was a venue for airing aviation exploits and challenges for as long as overseas flying resonated with discovery and exploration. The speakers who addressed the subject of aviation efficiency at a conference in London in February 1921 were whistling in the wind. The idea and the pursuit of Empire aviation might have folded had it not been for people who aligned it with Britain's strategic interests. The council of the British Empire League, which met at the House of Lords in March 1922, made a last-gasp plea for British Government assistance for an Empire airship service.

A great famine that began in 1899 brought radical changes in the mission to the Bhils. C. S. Thompson returned in November 1899 from a stay in Britain to find the Bhil region in the grip of a severe famine. A small number of Bhils migrated to urban centres, where rich merchants were at that time paying for food to be cooked and distributed to the starving in the streets. The missionaries themselves suffered badly during the monsoon period; many had to abandon their relief activities because of sickness. By October the acute stage of famine had passed, and hardly any adults were coming for food to the mission centres. Writing in November 1900, Charles Gill set out his plans to establish the Bhil mission on a much firmer footing. In the initial years, Thompson had carried out almost all of the evangelistic and itinerating work.

The Australian Labour Party (ALP) and the British Labour Party (BLP) experienced mixed, fluctuating and sharply contrasting fortunes, both domestically and comparatively, between 1980 and 2010. The 1980s were also extremely successful years for Labour at the state level. From the mid 1990s to the end of the decade Labour suffered defeats in most of the states, although it recaptured its former hegemony in New South Wales. The most recent British general election, of May 2010, however, has seen Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair in 2007, defeated by the self-professed 'modern' and 'progressive' Conservative David Cameron. Cameron dismissed Brown's Labour Party as 'reactionary', as mired in 'the old ways of command and control'. In Australia the easy-going and popular Bob Hawke brought much needed healing powers and firm, but largely consensual, leadership to the ALP.

Eltis explores the ways in which the women’s suffrage campaign was performative, surveying the connections between suffrage activism, theatre, and protest. The campaign for Votes for Women was the first political movement to use the arts deliberately and strategically. The theatricality at the heart of women’s political activism from the last decades of the nineteenth century until the First World War was not, however, simply a matter of making clear the popularity of their demands. Feminist activists and writers were also deploying spectacle and performance tactically to challenge notions of woman’s ‘true nature’, her ‘natural’ sphere of activity, and what constituted ‘womanliness’. Militant acts of civil disobedience and symbolic violence against property were inherently theatrical, not designed to instil fear or seriously to undermine the infrastructure of government, but rather to command public attention to the passionate commitment of the suffragettes, and their rejection of existing male-controlled systems of law and justice.

This chapter traces to what extent dialectics is an epistemological concern in Wilhelm Dilthey, E. Husserl, Georg Simmel and Max Weber. For Simmel, dialectics is a sort of methodological fragmentation, in the manner of the individual and society. By evaluating (implicitly) dialectics and (explicitly) scientific intersubjectivity, Simmel assesses the essence of his dual schema of forms and concepts, where both constitute the scientific criteria of the humanities. From a study of methodology, Dilthey proceeds to the philosophical contribution of epistemology and the epistemological contribution of philosophy to science. Philosophy and epistemology are pivotal parts of his theoretical concerns, without ever losing their conceptual equality in his work. Phenomenology's hermeneutic turn was inaugurated by Martin Heidegger. To be more precise, the hermeneutic turn that Heidegger introduced was an ontological turn of phenomenology, probably against Husserl's epistemological transcendentalism of the eidetic reduction.

This chapter considers not only the victories, or the glorious defeats, of Scottish opposition to British military cutbacks, but also looks at occasions where Scottish battalions went down without a fight. The government's post-Suez credibility on foreign policy and defence matters, such as it was, rested on its ability to push through its defence economies and priorities in the face of opposition within the armed forces. The political storm over 1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (1st Argylls) began before the threat to the battalion materialised. It was the service of the battalion in Aden itself, in the context of political and press criticism of the British authorities' handling of the British withdrawal, that brought 'the Argylls' to public notice. The 'Save the Argylls' public campaign which followed was led by retired senior officers, while the serving battalion and constituted regiment maintained the requisite distance.

Different advocacy campaigns achieve different results and take different functional forms. The Falun Gong campaign exemplifies the boomerang pattern elaborated by Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink in their classic work. The case of the campaign for intellectual property rights (IPR) protection is not an instance of the 'boomerang' at work, but nevertheless reflects a familiar pattern of transnational advocacy network (TAN) mobilization. State preferences for better IPR protection may be sufficiently strong to encourage cooperation with transnational actors on the issue, yet not always strong enough to enforce compliance within Chinese borders. Lacking an indigenous legal tradition of IPR protection, the concept of intellectual property traces its origins in China to the early twentieth century when it was introduced by colonial powers. Development of China's IPR framework was given a considerable nudge by anti-piracy agreements at the international level and Beijing's eagerness to be more integrated and compliant with them.

This chapter discusses film production and explores certain principal questions of film art. It considers the relationship between film and technology and examines the aesthetic problems related to the cinematic imagery present in silent films.

Bhils have disciplined themselves to become good Christians, but it was Christianity on their own terms. This chapter examines their society, their history and their healing practices. C. S. Thompson had come to work amongst the Bhils in 1880 in accordance with a new strategy that the Church Missionary Society (CMS) was adopting at that time in India. The chapter also examines how the Bhils were made to fit into an evolutionary schema. In his report, Thomas Hendley claimed that in general 'The Bhils are a healthy race.' In making this claim, he appears to have been guided more by certain notions current at that time about the 'healthy primitive' than by any reality on the ground. Hendley observed that the Bhils believed that some people, mainly women, had the ability to cause sickness, misfortune or death.

The introduction of museums and legislation to protect monuments, antiquities and artworks came late to British West Africa in relation to many other territories of the British Empire. The likes of Kenneth Murray, E. H. Duckworth and H. V. Meyerowitz, who tirelessly campaigned for a colonial museum policy, were only too aware that West Africa's past was being emptied out by the very hegemonic forces they represented. Toward the end of his speech to the Sierra Leone Society, Robert Hall acknowledged the need to explain why his challenge to create a national museum was addressed to a group of amateur enthusiasts rather than to government. Although Sierra Leone was Britain's oldest and once most prestigious West African territory, by the mid-twentieth century its importance had long been eclipsed by the larger and more economically significant territories of Nigeria and the Gold Coast.