This chapter argues that while Agostino Brunias's paintings were meant to contribute to the natural history discourse and to the visualisation of social and racial classification in the Caribbean in practice, they potentially function in an entirely different and complicated way. In 1983, Christie's offered a group of Brunias paintings at an auction of 'Important English Pictures'. Included among these was a work that the auction house referred to as Two Ladies Attended by a Negro Servant. The chapter looks at Brunias's work differently from other scholars, using his depiction of ambiguously raced women to consider how the artist's images might be understood to challenge the idea of racial categories as they work to support them. Like casta paintings and ethnographic images, other colonial artwork that sought to make order of the 'new' peoples of the so-called New World typically depended on the use of text.

The colonial and dominion franchise status of the first peoples of Australia, Canada and New Zealand was formed through a potent mixture of racism, anxiety and calculation. In 1870, Earl Grey, secretary of state for colonies from 1846 to 1852, expressed his fear that the New Zealand settlers' rush to manhood suffrage would disadvantage Maori people. The new 'ultra-democratic government', he wrote, 'in which the Maoris cannot be allowed their fair share of power, will not long abstain from giving them cause for discontent'. From the European perspective, the existence of the Maori seats was now less about amalgamation and containment, and more the segregation of a dwindling indigenous population. Ontario retained a property qualification for indigenous people enfranchised under the Gradual Civilization Act for twenty years after manhood suffrage was adopted for the non-indigenous population in 1888.

In this chapter, the author argues that the Gordon Riots constituted an imperial disruption in two senses. Using the Gordon Riots as a lens, the chapter examines the relationship between London, nation, and empire. Tracing the historiography of the Gordon Riots reveals several different interpretations that have prevailed since the 'riotous and tumultuous assembly' rocked the city for a week in June 1780. By the eighteenth century, many in England were convinced that Protestantism ensured their liberties, freedoms, and rights. Legal restrictions on Roman Catholics in Britain date back to the Henrician Reformation. Inspired by the successful anti-relief efforts in Scotland, the Protestant Association in London gathered signatures on its petition to repeal England's Catholic Relief Act. An anonymous pamphlet about the Gordon Riots attributed to Ignatius Sancho condemned the Protestant Association's revival of anti-Catholic sentiment.

This chapter investigates the role of institutions in setting the climate of accommodation or prejudice in which Indian students lived during their stay in Britain. It emphasis on the reaction of institutions in Britain to discrimination, either from British students or from the Indian Government. Many British institutions sought to accommodate the cultural requirements of their Indian students in ways that were far in advance of official practices in other white-dominated English-speaking countries of the period. The growth of organisations, such as the Cambridge Majlis, London Indian Society, and Edinburgh Indian Association, run mainly by Indian students, was a response to the ostracism, but it also helped to perpetuate it. The context of mutual ethnic endogamy is one among several issues that requires a reassessment of Shompa Lahiri's assertion that British policy toward Indian students was 'surveillance, control and restriction, executed under the cloak of paternalism and protection'.

This chapter examines three of the most notorious mass killings of the Algerian war. It includes the Constantine massacres of August 1955, the lethal ambush of a French army patrol near the Palestro gorge, in May 1956, and the war's single largest incident of mass civilian killing, at Melouza a year later. The first marked the war's decisive reversion to an asymmetric dynamic of targeted Front de Liberation Nationale killing and mass security force reprisals. The second was a more conventional military encounter in which this asymmetry of Algerian versus French losses was reversed. And the last confirmed the conflict's descent into fratricidal killing and unacknowledged Algerian-on-Algerian civil war. In each case, perpetrators and victims differed. Yet the rhetorical outbursts surrounding each instance of massacre evinced remarkable similarities in the ways such violence was supported, condoned or condemned. Each of these events also triggered heightened levels of French military repression.

The convener of the Social Work Committee was instructed to admit to Cornton Vale 'only such men as are reasonably likely to prove suitable for settlement overseas'. The regular receipt of 'very cheering letters' from colonists in Canada and Australia continued to convince the Social Work Committee that it was performing a useful service. The YMCA was so convinced of the efficacy and increasing urgency of its emigration work that in February 1930 it devoted a whole issue of Scottish Manhood to publicizing its various initiatives. During 1928 and 1929 a total of 647 British boys were placed in Canada under the Church Nomination Scheme. Throughout its existence the Quarrier organization has adhered to the Christian principles of its founder, although after the war its emigration policy was also influenced by the eugenic, imperialist climate of the age.

This chapter illustrates the social foundations of capitalism and puts forward the argument that there is a constant tension between dis-embedding and re-embedding mechanisms of economic activity into a less commodified society. It deals with the transformations that Western capitalist societies are undergoing, and how the double movement operates. The chapter highlights how the socio-economic and institutional complementarities that characterised postwar capitalism created relatively integrated socio-economic regimes, which have been inherently challenged since the 1970s. It addresses the relevant role played by the increased mobility of capital, labour and goods in this process, underlining their crucial destabilising impact on contemporary fragmented capitalism. Finally, the chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book reconstructs the debate about capitalism and its transformations within the urban tradition. It shows how social policies have undergone important reforms, partly undermining their sheltering capacities.

The ivory trade of East Africa was of long standing. There are references to it in the earliest sources on East African history, like the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, compiled nearly 2,000 years ago. By the mid-nineteenth century Muslim caravan leaders and slavers were themselves penetrating East Africa, trading ivory, attempting to outwit African middlemen, and establishing hunting and trading 'colonies' in the interior. Fears of the decline and extinction of the East African ivory trade were firmly planted in the European mind by the writings of Joseph Thomson. After the First World War, many ivory hunters operated in the Belgian Congo and French Equatorial Africa. Richard Meinertzhagen had a tendency to equate human with animal bags, and it earned him a rebuke from the Commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate, Sir Charles Eliot.

Migratory aesthetics and artists with a migrant background can have various points of entry into museums, galleries and collections. This chapter examines interventions by three artists, Fred Wilson, Yinka Shonibare and Rina Banerjee, who all take a critical de- and postcolonial approach to the institutional structures and spaces of Western museums. Mining the Museum was based on a collaboration that allowed the artist to interview the staff and to have open access to the collection, including the objects and histories that had been hidden away in the museum's basement. Like Wilson, Shonibare highlights the complexity and reciprocity of interracial and colonial relations. The Musée Guimet invited Rina Banerjee to make an intervention in the hope that this could help the institution get beyond the orientalist and Eurocentric outlook on which the Museum's collection was originally founded.

In Britain the nineteenth-century hunting cult had an extraordinary range of cultural manifestations. As the century progressed the hunting cult was transferred overseas, often searching for a genuine wilderness, and generated an entire ethos which distinguished certain characteristics of the Hunt as markers of civilisation and gentlemanly conduct. The best way for us to approach the hunting cult in the new landscape is perhaps through its architectural expression and the influence of animals on interior decoration. Edwin Landseer epitomised the role of hunting in nineteenth-century culture, transforming the innocence and easy self-confidence of eighteenth-century sporting paintings into a deeply self-conscious and often troubled response to the natural world. Hunters made the connections between empire and natural history even more explicit. In the development of both the study and display areas of the natural history museums the scientists and museum curators were dependent upon imperial hunters.