This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book provides some insight into the myriad ways that insiders and outsiders conceptualised Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand. The records of the ethnic press and ethnic associations offer insight into the collective depiction of Scottishness and Irishness in New Zealand. The ocean passage to New Zealand revealed differences in religious practices which were associated with the Irish and the Scots. First impressions of the New Zealand landscape were also important, with Irish and Scottish migrants stressing similarities with home, often focusing on specific localities as well as the broader nation. The national characteristics of Irish and Scottish migrants conveyed a range of elements that were considered typical of Irishness and Scottishness. Scottish migrants tended to disseminate and engage good-naturedly with the same characteristics that outsiders linked to them such as clannishness and frugality.

The Great Exhibition of 1851, held in London's Hyde Park, has long served as a symbol not only of Britain's industrial development but also of its burgeoning Empire. The enlarged Sydenham Crystal Palace was the successor to the Hyde Park building, and it remained standing in south London from 1854 to 1936. The Sydenham Crystal Palace depicted Britain's Empire as the site of Benjamin Disraeli's famous speech in which he sought to unite all classes under the banner of monarchy and empire. The Crystal Palace reached its apogee as an imperial site with the 1911 Festival of Empire, also known as the Coronation Exhibition. The 1905 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, also held at the Crystal Palace and the most direct forerunner of the 1911 Festival of Empire, was considerably larger and more popular than the African Exhibition.

The chapter examines intellectual interactions between Burke and Reynolds and contrasts their conceptions of the sublime, in order to determine the extent of Burke’s influence on his friend. Reynolds’s own conception of the sublime is shown to be solidly anchored in the neoclassical tradition and its assimilation of the sublime to the ‘great style’ as well as to Michelangelo’s terribilità. Yet, one may discern ways in which the Enquiry’s irrationalism filtered into Reynolds’s own theory of art, which suggests that he played a part in mediating his friend’s aesthetics for the Royal Academy of Arts. Reynolds’s reconciliation of the neoclassical notion of the ‘great style’ with a new emphasis on imagination and intensity of affect is then understood as one of the first stages in the development of ‘Burkean’ academic productions, which flourished from the mid-1770s onwards.

The growth of new maritime missions, often administered by women, took place during an age marked by philanthropic impulse, evangelical zeal and a cult of domesticity. Naval philanthropy was not just a specific expression of the maritime mission; it was also, like the general maritime mission, an outgrowth of the Victorian preoccupation with philanthropy. Philanthropic societies established sailors' homes or rests to provide inexpensive accommodation for naval men in port. Philanthropists, like Agnes Weston, highlighted the importance of home, family and nation in their outreach to naval men, whether in temperance campaigns, port accommodation, spiritual ministrations, or disaster relief. Agnes ministrations either castigated naval men for their profligate vices or celebrated them for their domestic virtues. While reforming naval manhood was central to her mission, Agnes consistent allusions to reprobate naval manhood helped to cultivate older stereotypes of the Jolly Jack Tar.

For cocoa manufacturers the period of pacification and consolidation was marked by support for what became known as indirect rule in West Africa. Cocoa was originally grown in Central America and was first brought to Europe by Christopher Columbus. A dominant image of Africans on cocoa and other advertising during late nineteenth century was of labourers working tropical plantations, producing raw materials for European consumption. The cocoa advertisements from the first decade of the twentieth century appear to advocate support for the notion of 'partnership' as well as the value of promoting African peasant production. The cocoa companies, Cadbury's in particular, appear to have been at one with the ideas disseminated by the Third Party. The cocoa manufacturers, however, continued to maintain that the majority of holdings were 'very small', as W. A. Cadbury commented to the West African Lands Committee in February 1913.

The issue of self-government for the Empire's subjects was a different matter altogether. While George Padmore's argument for self-determination gained urgency from the war, in the Soviet book he also made his contribution to wartime thinking about postwar life. The evidence thus far, Padmore thought, suggested that development, under the British, could be a long time coming. Like the czarist regime, the British had kept colonial people uneducated, untrained, unindustrialized, a shortsighted policy. The Soviet Union had succeeded in educating Asian peoples more backward, to Padmore's mind, than Africans and had brought them rapidly into the industrial, modern world. Africa could do the same if Africans ruled themselves and if African states were socialist. Socialism was essential because the ethnically diverse African states would necessarily be multinational. In a capitalist economy, divisions might be expressed as racial conflict, but the true cause would be economic.

The emergence of public interest in the Dutch Indies must be considered as part of the transformation of the old mercantile empire of the seventeenth century into a modern colonial state. The traditional conservative colonial policy mainly drew in ideas of 'association', whereby the Dutch and indigenous cultures existed separately from each other. The Dutch Empire also included possessions in the Caribbean: Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles. At the end of the nineteenth century the Netherlands underwent a process of centralisation and modernisation. The chapter argues that imperial ideology played an important role in the development of national identity in the Netherlands during 1870 and 1960. At the start of the twenty-first century old certainties seem to crumble rapidly, which is all the more reason to dig into the historical question how people in the Netherlands tried to deal with their complicated status of an imperial underdog.

The chapter begins in 1546 when a military incursion was launched by the Dublin government against the Irish lordships of the O’Mores and O’Connors in the Irish midlands of Laois and Offaly. I argue that this military venture was the first step in the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Eventually in the 1550s the plantation of this region was undertaken, thus initiating the general pattern whereby Ireland would be conquered and resettled down to the end of the seventeenth century. The chapter then goes on to examine the other major policy issues of the mid-Tudor period, specifically the growing threat posed to the Tudor state by Shane O’Neill’s ascendancy in Ulster and the incursion of Scottish settlers from the Outer Hebrides into the north-east of Ireland. Finally, consideration is given to the long viceregal administration of the third earl of Sussex and the criticism it drew from Irish officials in the late 1550s and early 1560s owing to its recourse to the ‘cess’ and other practices. Throughout the chapter how these issues arose in the treatises is discussed and the ideas put forward contextualised.

In 1942 Chapman had dreamed of the day when the missionaries would return to find 'a little Church pure as gold and tested in the fire'. The first post-war synod in 1946 was a tetchy affair. Burmese ministers were aggrieved that their wartime exploits had not been recognised. During the early 1950s the additional criteria were tested in a trio of cases in Kachin State. The first involved the Yunnan Tibetan Christian Mission (YTCM). The second case, in April 1951, involved the Roman Catholic Mission in Myitkyina. Unlike their predecessors, post-war missionaries were unburdened with the baggage of colonialism and were more open-minded. 'Buddhist missionaries and communist myrmidons' dissuaded Christian children from attending church on Sundays and unsettled everyone else too. Many important issues were addressed in the 1960 Synod. Methodists in Upper Burma had gained a reputation for their innovative social projects.

Race was central to the supposedly mission adventure story, 'The Little Savages of Nodlon'. The twofold duty of the English race, Sir Charles Lucas argued, was to replenish and subdue the earth and to rule and administer native races. The racialised discourse of child rescue created an inner city in which race, class and tribe were intertwined, embellished with such negative, even threatening descriptors as 'feeble and famished', 'ragged' and 'predatory'. The Darkest England / Darkest Africa comparison was as much a reference to race as to geography. In the colonies, the settler population was aware of the 'savage within', the Indigenous population that they had displaced. In Natal Dr.Stephenson observed, 'outcast London' could contribute to 'the salvation of this colony from the ominous consequences of undue disparity between the white and black populations'.