C.F.G. Masterman reflected on the close relationship between England's capital city and the British Empire, declaring 'that increased intercommunications' helped not only to spread British values to the dominions but also effectively to 'bring colonial ideas to London'. Moreover, in exploring the interconnections between the English city and empire, contemporaries drew explicit parallels between the imperial explorers in Africa and the investigators of the urban slum. This chapter explores whether the imperial metaphor and symbolism deployed by researchers in the East End influenced those who sought to investigate the slums in Portsmouth, Coventry and Leeds. Indeed, these three communities endured very different degrees of slumdom and diverse social problems. The chapter turns to the East End and examines the contemporary explorers' assumptions and analysis of slumdom to consider whether this acted as a template for social investigators in the provinces.

At some point around the year 1200, a noblewoman asked the Cistercian monk Engelhard of Langheim to write a vita of the canoness Mechthild of Diessen, who had briefly been the abbess of Edelstetten. At the time of Pope Anastasius IV, she reluctantly agreed to become the abbess of Edelstetten, a convent desperately in need of reform in Engelhard's version of events. She successfully improved the religious practices and commitment to the spiritual life at Edelstetten, but her time there seems to have been relatively short. The descriptions of Mechthild's interactions with people inside and outside the religious houses are a rich source for the thin grey line that separated the ecclesiastical and secular spheres in the German kingdom during the twelfth century.

The situation for Africans who lived in Germany and worked as teaching assistants in Berlin and Hamburg was quite different from that of their colleagues who remained in the colonies. Indeed, some Lektoren produced texts that delved not only into their national customs, but German ones as well. African assistants were, however, undeniably integral to the learning process at the Berlin Seminar and Hamburg Institute. The assistants' roles were in sense academic ones. Lektoren worked within a methodological framework that demanded the presence of a native assistant when 'exotic' languages were being taught. From early on Njo Dibone, Meinhof's first African teacher, assisted with anthropological and literary pursuits. In many of the more than 600 books and articles that he wrote in his lifetime, Meinhof struggled to define African racial hierarchies.

The world was invited to witness the spectacle of the grandeur of Paris, making the city itself an object of consumption for wealthy visitors. 'Imperial Paris' became a highly contested notion as those with conflicting political ideals fought for symbolic ownership of urban space and representation. The material transformation of Paris was indeed massive. However, this is one of the few instances in which Paris was compared directly with ancient Rome; Paris was much more commonly compared with Athens in contemporary discourse. From the late eighteenth century onwards British guides had observed that the Parisians were an out-of-door people, spending much of their time in public places rather than cultivating the virtues of the home. The extrovert life of the Parisians and the little dramas being played out in every cafe or street became part of the promotional policy of the French capital.

This chapter draws on company sources to explore the complex interrelatedness of 'home' and 'empire' for Rowntree and for York. It examines the role played by the firm in influencing understandings of race, empire and the city, as well as in providing a space for employees effectively to act out 'local' and 'imperial' consciousness. The chapter explains the ways in which Rowntree constructed their relationship to York and the versions of the city they represented and created. It considers how Rowntree represented the rest of the world, and their own place in the British empire. Workers were involved in making global, often imperial connections at an economic, social and cultural level through migration and missionary work, and through the performance and spectatorship of race in factory minstrel shows. The chapter illuminates how imperial identities were situated in the context of imperialism and in relation to the chocolate industry in particular.

The chapter demonstrates how Glasgow had become, and could remain, 'the first municipality in the world and the second city of the British Empire'. Although population was often used as the principal, and in some respects most dubious, criterion, the municipal claim could also be based on the degree of economic integration into the imperial enterprise. Indeed, few cities were as closely connected with imperial commerce as Glasgow, both in historical contexts and, particularly, in terms of the mature empire economy of the later nineteenth century. From the eighteenth century onwards, the Glasgow economy was strikingly diversified. Analyses of Glasgow's class differentiation similarly need to adopt the spatial, social and cultural perspectives of internal colonialism. The traditional emphasis on Glasgow's industries was repeated, and it is perhaps not surprising that there were pilgrimages of Scottish Americans as well as parties of New Zealanders to the exhibition.

This chapter translates the vivid description of the life of the noble lord Wiprecht of Groitzsch. It then offers a very different perspective on Henry IV and Henry V's reigns than the typical pro-Salian or pro-Saxon narrative sources. For understanding the political, social, religious and economic developments in the region between Saxony and Bohemia during the early twelfth century, it is a rich, almost unparalleled source. Wiprecht of Groitzsch has earned a reputation in modern scholarship as the social climber par excellence of the late Salian period. The turning point in Wiprecht's career seems to have been Henry IV's first Italian campaign during the early 1080s; according to the Deeds, Wiprecht led the Czech contingent alongside Czech king Vratislav's young son, Borivoj. Thereafter, Wiprecht of Groitzsch would be an increasingly prominent player in Saxon and imperial politics until his death.

Proselytism was officially frowned upon in the Indian Empire. Conversion from one religion to another was highly political and potentially explosive. The Wesleyan missionaries' teetotalism and modest stipends separated them from colonial neighbours. World War I disturbed a period of relative calm in Upper Burma. The Wesleyan missionaries were relatively ignorant about rural politics and were generally less sympathetic. The Wesleyans were perplexed because pongyis were poisoning the minds of ordinary 'Burman Buddhists'. Even the American Baptists were shaken by Buddhist truculence in the towns. The Hsaya San rebellion broke out in Lower Burma at the end of December 1930. The Marxist-dominated All Burma Students' Union (ABSU) and Dobama Asiayone (We Burmans) expanded rapidly during the 1930s. Dobama had begun as a student political movement in 1933 but quickly embraced industrial workers and cultivators.

The journey to India and the initial move towards the first place of settlement meant the beginning of an itinerant life for missionaries and scholars. The arrival of railways made travelling within India easier and quicker. The greatest problem facing the Germans who travelled to nineteenth-century India was the environment. Despite the problems encountered upon first arriving in India, especially by the missionaries, the various elite German groups made attempts to reconstruct the type of housing in which they had resided in Europe. The type of work which the missionaries carried out divides into a series of categories, broadly defined as preaching, administrating, teaching, healing, researching and providing industrial work. Some missionaries spent most of their lives in India, where they died, often prematurely, as a result of the contraction of a tropical disease.