Chapter 1 examines connections between abolition debates and legislation in Britain and the decisions of colonial administrations to amend, retain or abolish the death penalty in the 1950s and 1960s. The British government made only limited efforts to promote abolition across the Empire and readily accepted arguments made by governors, political and judicial appointees and elected lawmakers for retaining executions. The course of imperial abolition was consequently uneven in ways that reflected the diversity of colonial legal and penal cultures, crime control concerns, constitutional arrangements and political dynamics, and which saw racialized systems of colonial penal violence persist into the abolition era. Yet even in colonies where the death penalty was retained into the 1970s and beyond, death sentences were upheld in an increasingly narrow range of murder cases. In some jurisdictions, this shift predated British abolition and indicates a more pervasive and dispersed turn against capital punishment across the Empire than is captured in statute laws alone.

The Belgian historian Jos Van Ussel’s History of Sexual Repression inspired Michel Foucault to argue that the history of sexuality was not marked by silence but by a deafening discursive explosion. Following Foucault, many historians have sought to substantiate his influential claim by documenting the strong discursive preoccupation with same-sex eroticism in ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ from the late nineteenth century onwards. The unstudied case of Belgium challenges both the geography and the chronology of this vestigial grand narrative. Unlike in larger neighboring countries (Britain, France, and Germany), which commonly get to tell the story of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ as a whole, Belgian intellectuals and policymakers barely broached the issue of homosexuality until the 1950s. Why this was the case, and how it complicates our understanding of queer history by breaking up the idea of a single and singular Europe from the inside out, is this book’s main subject. The Introduction also calls attention to the importance of silence and omission and to the role of religion in the history of (homo)sexualities.

Historians, academics and military officers have viewed the Malayan Emergency as an exemplar of how counterinsurgency warfare should be conducted. Numerous studies and authors dissected British operations in Malaya during and in the aftermath of the war in South Vietnam. They looked for parallels with Vietnam and why Vietnam failed while Malaya was a success. In recent years, some authors have compared the Emergency with British and American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, British troops studied the Malayan insurgency of the 1950s before deploying to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2006. According to Australian historian Professor David Horner, the Confrontation with Indonesia was ‘one of the most successful applications of military force in a low-level conflict since the Second World War’ but has been largely ignored and has attracted a dearth of scholarly interest. This has been particularly evident in the role of the Australian forces generally, and especially the Australian Army’s intelligence services.

From 1945 to 1975, the Australian Army always served overseas as a junior partner in a coalition, usually as part of a British Commonwealth force. This was the case during the occupation of Japan and the Korean War and under British command in Malaya and Borneo. However, the Vietnam War highlighted several problems for the junior partner in an American-dominated alliance. Relations remained cordial throughout the war in South Vietnam, especially at the individual level. However, stress points soon emerged that had the potential to damage the relationship and adversely affect intelligence collection, analysis and sharing.

Before the American Civil War it was widely believed hat cotton was the key to victory. Many Southerners believed that by withholding cotton, they could force the North to accede to the South’s independence. Otherwise, Britain and other European importers of Southern cotton would be forced to intervene on the South’s behalf. Similarly, in the North the belief was widely held that cutting off Southern sales of cotton would impoverish the South and reduce its ability to buy arms, forcing it to give up its war. Early in the war, the South began to withhold cotton. Soon after, the North imposed a naval blockade that reduced Southern exports of cotton to Europe to a trickle. Although the South was weakened, it continued to fight for years. And for reasons including the moral imperatives of the war, the willingness to aid unemployed cotton workers, and the development of alternative sources of supply, cutting off exports of Southern cotton failed to have the effects on the North or on the Europeans that the South expected. The North was not forced to give up its war to defeat the Confederacy, and Britain and other European importers were not forced to intervene.

A pre-war policy of free trade in Britain and protection in Germany meant that Britain entered the war producing 35 per cent of its food needs while Germany produced 80 per cent. And yet Britain managed to feed itself adequately while Germany faced food shortages. Britain successfully adopted a range of counter-measures, exhibiting a capacity for substitution, allowing the economy to be flexible enough to survive the German blockade. The blockade accounted for at most around a quarter of the decline in German food consumption, which was largely the result of a collapse in domestic production caused by excessive mobilisation. German counter-measures were sometimes successful, but at other times indicate a less flexible economy with a limited capacity for substitution. The British government quickly reversed wartime policies to boost agricultural production and entered World War II equally vulnerable to submarine blockade, while Germany pursued autarkic policies to avoid dependence on seaborne imports.

The chapter distinguishes two types of economic warfare: ’capacity-focused economic warfare’ and ‘market-focused economic warfare’. The latter dominated the era of mercantilism. Still, the practices of economic war during the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ that opposed France and England were manifold and evolved throughout the period. The British pursued an aggressive strategy of market-focused economic warfare until the Pax Britannica made it largely superfluous. On the other hand, from 1713 on, the French tried to disentangle economic competition from military conflict, in times of both peace and war. Even if Napoleon was a mercantilist, the Continental System is best understood as a failed gamble on capacity-focused economic warfare rather than an exercise in mercantilism. This prepared the post-1815 advent of the liberal international order in which economic competition and war became separate entities.

The chapter begins with a survey of literature on nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs as a cultural practice and the complicity of academic disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology in promoting violent forms of pedagogy. It provides a brief overview of the ‘nasty’ Indian nautch, a racially charged practice framed simultaneously by colonial desire and abhorrence, which moved between the Empire’s exhibitions and theatres as disturbances. It then examines one particular colonial exhibition, the failed Liberty of London’s 1885 exhibition, and specifically analyses the work of nautch dancers whose moving bodies both engaged and disrupted the scopophilia framing live human exhibits. The chapter then listens to the dissenting voices of Liberty’s performers and delves into the legal proceedings they set in motion against their producers. In the final section, the chapter examines how re-imagining the Liberty’s nautch experience by embodying archival silences and slippages might be a usefully anarchic ‘corpo-active’ method that animates the memories of subaltern dancers forgotten by both British and Indian nationalist history.

This chapter explores the ways in which British imperial reforms were part of broader imperial rivalries and interconnections; the racial, gender, and political limits of Enlightenment reforms; the perceptions and bargaining that shaped reforms; and the relationship between reform and Revolution. It questions teleological approaches that cast British imperial reforms in the 1760s and 1770s as having led to Revolution in the thirteen colonies. In a global and Enlightenment context, British reformers did not pursue particularly radical reforms until the Intolerable Acts of 1774. These Acts were reactionary punishments intended to reform colonial thinking and behavior. They foreclosed the previously vital bargaining process between the imperial government and the colonists, and the colonists saw dire parallels with the monopolistic and tyrannical East India Company. The government’s attempt to use non-negotiable punishment to reform colonial thinking and behavior, rather than reforms to imperial tax and trade policies, most directly stimulated Revolution.

Britons and British subjects with family members deeply involved in the transatlantic economy were an important feature of University life. These students, who grew in number due the increasing profits of the slave economy and the underdeveloped state of tertiary education in the colonies, were accepted and nurtured by fellows and masters who, in many cases, owned plantations, held investments in the slave trade, or had family members serving as governors in the North American colonies. In following the experiences of these students, the chapter details the lives and struggles of undergraduates, particularly those who traveled abroad to Cambridge, and the emotional and personal bonds that fellows and their young charges developed. The chapter is a reminder that, when considering institutional connections to enslavement, political economy was but one side of the story – the emotional, social, and cultural bonds between the sons of enslavers and their fellow Britons were also integral.

Ayahs provided care labor to British families on the transoceanic voyages between India and Britain. In British cultural representations, mobility endowed ayahs with wealth and agency. This chapter, by contrast, argues that the lives of peripatetic ayahs were quite precarious; they had no legal protection from abuse and abandonment. While the East India Company had instituted a bond system for the repatriation of ayahs to India, the British state from 1858 formulated the domestic labor of ayahs as a “private” issue beyond state intervention, thereby upholding the privileges of British employers and providing no solution for the abandonment of ayahs in Britain. An Ayahs’ Home was set up in London, providing boarding for ayahs and allowing London missionaries the opportunity to proselytize the captive group of “heathen” women. Using petitions by ayahs, vernacular sources, newspapers, and documents from the Ayahs’ Home and the India Office in London, this chapter highlights the experiences of traveling ayahs from ship voyages to London courtrooms, their gendered attempts to preserve their caste purity – deemed lost for crossing the ocean – and their desperate attempts to return home to India.