This chapter analyses landscape stories presented in three cultural interpretive centres along the Oregon Trail in the state of Oregon (USA) and of narratives of settlers and place presented in Canberra's National Museum of Australia (NMA). In examining public cultural interpretations of settlement as they are represented in museums and historical centres, the chapter examines contemporary stories about settler pasts in relation to place. The narrative of situating settlers in their new world homes is given both substance and subversion by sustaining gaps between representations of geography, ecology, narrative and the embodied presence of the visitor. It illustrates the epistemic and metaphysical disaster-zones, as well as the more familiar regions of environmental crisis. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1872: 'We Americans are all cuckoos; we make our homes in the nests of other birds'.

This introduction provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a means of exploring some of the characteristics distinctive to the colonial encounter and indigenous and migrant challenges to colonial rule in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. It focuses on colonial administrative structures with the emergence of settler civil society in terms of welfare policy, regional colonial administration, the development of labour unions with and part in the creation of foundational national myths. The book also focuses on the struggles over the representation of national histories through analyses of key cultural institutions and monuments, both historically and in terms of contemporary strategies. It analyses the potential roles allocated to the exhibition and display of Maori artifacts and heritage in a museum celebrating the national identity of Aotearoa New Zealand.

In response to the economic crisis, right-wing neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideas took strong and increasingly hegemonic international root. Both the Australian Labour Party (ALP) under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and New Labour shared a dominant policy commitment to economic neo-liberalism, this was tempered far more in Australia by continuing state intervention and regulation. The Fraser government's inability to tackle the immediate problems of a 'wages explosion', 'double digit inflation and unemployment' was the major factor in determining the outcome of the 1983 federal election. The huge size of the public deficit inherited from the Fraser government meant that Keating had to tread cautiously in his attempt to balance fiscal expansion and cuts in spending and tax rises. New Labour's willingness and ability to 'learn lessons' from the successful ALP served it well at the 1997 general election.

In contemporary Russia, official discourse on migration has focused on the portrayal of illegal migrant labour as an existential threat to the national economy. Speaking about the impact of illegal migrant labour on unemployment figures, President Vladimir Putin pointed to migration as one of the most serious problems facing the far east of Russia, where an influx of foreign workers, primarily Chinese, has been deemed responsible for pushing locals out of the labour market. Putin unequivocally asserted that the right to work must be guaranteed first of all to all Russian citizens. Another strand of Russian securitising discourse relating to migration exposes an explicit correlation of migration with crime in a broader context. There is one further aspect related to migration policy in Russia: the demographic crisis which the country is facing in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The main governmental institution in charge of implementing migration policy in contemporary Russia is the FMS. This chapter explores Russia's migration policy carried out in recent years within the framework of securitisation and normalisation.

The implication of museums in the imperial expansiveness of the late nineteenth century is a familiar phenomenon. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto and the Royal British Columbia museum in Victoria were two notable, yet very different, expressions of this phenomenon. The fact that the ROM contains one of the richest Chinese collections of any museum is largely down to White and the encouragement he received from Charles Trick Currelly. White believed that his justification was that Canada should have the opportunity to appreciate the glories of Chinese civilisation, as well as understand a great country and potential trading partner, which shared a Pacific Rim location. The result of ROM's imperialism was that Toronto's civic coming of age had taken the form of a desire to slot itself into the world civilisations of the past, into international empires rather than British.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the differentiated roots, channels and instruments of imperialism. It examines the sources and strains of Empire aviation. The book explores the paternalism, polemic, posturing, symbolism and spectacle surrounding the planning and performance of imperial aviation. British military aviation played its part by surveying and testing long-distance air routes that could be used for defending the Empire as well as for civil purposes in the Middle East, India and Africa. Aviation became the new imperial heroic; brave, dashing pilots became icons and were invested as the new Knights of the British Empire. The grandly titled Imperial Airways company was established as the 'chosen instrument' of organised Empire civil aviation in 1924. Facets of British imperial civil aviation history have gradually been tackled in a manner that veers away from bland narrative.

Books and films conveyed the bare history of air Empire, its technologies, organisation, key 'commercial' operator and spheres of operation. In interwar Britain, the pursuit of long-distance civil aviation was about the wish to maintain national standing and imperial interests in the face of competitive international industrial progress. Britain's designated imperial flagship civil airline was conceived during the world's first air war, and was part-seeded by anxiety about a second. The designated imperial airline was also a share-stock business part subsidised for ideological purposes. Only small numbers of people and small quantities of cargo circulated by air through imperial skies in the 1930s. But Imperial Airways did more than convey passengers and commodities; it facilitated and advanced British imperialism in a new technological setting. British imperial aviation helped to revive imperial ambition and pretensions in Britain in the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century.