Women were initially employed in the mid-nineteenth century to act as shipboard representatives for female emigrants, to aid them with seasickness and other intimate concerns. In the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand (USSCo.) there were limited opportunities for women to work at sea attending to female passengers. The USSCo. complex stitched communities together across shipboard and shore. On large passenger liners the providore department was usually the largest afloat, staffed by a team of stewards, stewardesses, cooks and other kitchen staff. The stewardesses of the Wairarapa could be honoured in photographs and monuments because they followed the predetermined script of appropriate femininity on board. In her work on American whaling men, Margaret Creighton has examined the ship as an institution of masculine indoctrination. The feminisation of ships has a long history in the West, first referenced in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1375.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on impetus for Empire aviation, and its geo-political, commercial and technical frameworks. British pilots were not the only ones to make private long-distance flights between the two world wars, but their accomplishments were seized on as signs of national strength. The influential and elite of Britain and Empire revelled in the heavenly perspectives which flying offered, and its sensations of power, speed and efficiency. Imperial Airways projected an idealised Britain to the Empire, and interpreted and refracted the Empire to Britons. The landing grounds used by British aircraft were safe islands in a foreign world. Leaving more traces of affection than fidelity, the reality and significance of flying imperially passed into memory after 1939.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that discrimination, even when experienced, was not a precondition for the ethnic consciousness felt by and ascribed to the Irish and Scots in New Zealand. It explores the aspects that insiders and outsiders perceived as distinctive of Scottish and Irish (Catholic and Protestant) ethnicities in New Zealand. The book examines the issue of language and accent of the Irish and Scots. It also examines the material tokens of Irish and Scottish ethnicity, traversing a range of elements including music, festivals, food and drink, and dress. The book acknowledges the existence and continuity of visible signs of ethnic affiliation, what has been termed a 'constellation of symbols, rituals, and rhetoric'. It also explores the extent to which Irish identity was conceptualised in political terms while Scottish identity was cultural.

This chapter traces the cultural and social history of mental illness in the settler imagination. It investigates the idea of Africa as a site of madness and considers the relationship between degeneracy and deviance. These themes were not incidental to settler culture but major recursive tropes. The European mentally ill in Kenya were certainly marginal but madness and transgression were not.

State attempts at the moral surveillance and regulation of settlers began, in fact, even before they departed from Britain. The opening of the colony to free settlement and commercial development demanded the end of the old system, and in 1823 a free market in the key staples of wheat and meat was introduced. In 1830, one of the most powerful, and invasive, mechanisms for the regulation of free settlers was created in the form of the Assignment Board. Publicans and innkeepers, individuals who had breached state regulations and ex-convicts were, for example, banned from receiving assigned servants. William Sorell's inability to create a coherent site for the delineation and regulation of 'respectable' formed one part of Anthony Fenn Kemp's complaints against him. Sorell's departure and George Arthur's arrival marked a key turning point in the relationship between the state and the regulation of colonial gender relations and sexual morality.

The embracing of Leopold II and his legacy in monuments, textbooks, expositions, film and elsewhere nationalised and rehabilitated the country's colonial past. Great power rivalries, ingenious if tricky diplomacy, and Leopold's tenacity resulted in recognition of his rule over much of the Congo around the time of the Berlin conference. Three things introduced Belgians to the Etat Independant du Congo (EIC): attempts by imperial enthusiasts to interest them in the Congo; vocal foreign assaults on the EIC administration; and Leopold's propaganda in response to attacks. Leopold segregated his European and African subjects to preserve the colony from outside influences and Belgians from supposedly dangerous Congolese, an approach that the post-1908 administration sustained. In fact what sets popular imperialism in Belgium apart from others is the remarkable yet ironic reverence reserved for one individual, Leopold II: remarkable because for veterans, ministers and enthusiasts.

This chapter argues that moral dilemmas are real or genuine conflicts between independent moral considerations. It addresses moral dilemmas concerning the legitimacy of parents' power through what John Rawls's public or political reasoning, that is, reasonableness as well as Thomas Nagel's account of public justification in a context of actual disagreement. In support of Nagel's position, the chapter looks at Bernard Williams's account of what genuine dilemmas are and how they arise. The view of moral dilemmas defended entails that the role of theory has its limits, and in particular, theory will not identify a general rule for the resolution of moral conflicts. The chapter outlines an approach to practical reason and practical judgement. It explains how practical judgement can complement theoretical reasoning when faced with moral dilemmas.