This chapter introduces the case files pertaining to Kenya Colony’s ‘white insane’ on which the book is based. It approaches the methodological challenges of utilising patient case files as historical sources and uses a number of individuated case studies to consider their value and the ways they might be read. The chapter also begins the identification of common themes and contemplates the correlation between the ‘white insane’ and the ‘poor white’.

This chapter investigates the evolution of levels of popularity of the imperial idea in British publishing. It redresses the imbalance between publishing and the press through an examination of the place of empire books in British publishing output. The chapter considers three major aspects dealt with books published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the 'imperial geographies', the 'imperial ethos' and the exhibition of the Empire in imperial territories through subsidiaries of major metropolitan publishers. Even more than the 'geographies of empire', the imperial ethos appears as the primary tool which allows us to gauge the popularity of empire among the British public in the period. Naturally, the ethos of empire was effectively celebrated in the printed material which was produced for imperial occasions. The chapter highlights the need to consider 'popular imperialism' as a proteiform phenomenon requiring a careful analysis of its multiple expressions in metropolitan popular cultures.

This chapter examines the identity and influence of individual Irishmen. The questions of land tenure, rural poverty, agrarian unrest, the development of strong links between such matters and political power and nationalism, were common to both Ireland and India during the period 1881-1921. Agriculture was the main means of subsistence for 50 per cent of Punjab's population, and the province was essentially a country of peasant proprietors. When the British in their turn took over from the Sikhs, they had already learned much about revenue collection, sometimes from mistakes made in other provinces. The collection of revenue had become more peremptory over the years since the days in which John Lawrence and his several Irish subordinates had actively defended indigenous institutions and the rights of the landholder. Moneylenders now increasingly demanded agricultural property as collateral and tried to confiscate or buy peasants' fields.

The Italian Empire was to be one of the first casualties of Benito Mussolini's rash challenging of Britain in 1940. The consensual relationship between people and regime, cemented by the foundation of empire, cooled and then disintegrated as military debacle in Africa, then Europe and then on the peninsula itself followed. The imperial model envisaged was one where a landholding peasantry would be free even of the share-cropping shackles of the baron's native Tuscany let alone the horrors of the southern Italian latifondo. Carlo Levi was glad to see an Italian peasantry impervious to empire and he could therefore peer into the minds of a people untouched by the hex of Fascism. Italian East Africa was abruptly taken away only five years after it had come into existence and Libya was permanently lost to Italy in 1943, a few short years after its brutal 'pacification'.

The early colonial system had produced a different family structure, one in which the household tended towards being a self-sufficient unit and in which men and women laboured largely for themselves. Larger colonial employers and landowners, therefore, had good economic reasons to pursue a different productive and reproductive order. One sign of the shift in attitudes was the production, from the early 1800s, of regular statements of the labour performed by government-maintained convicts. The determination to reduce state spending not only affected labour policy, it also stimulated a much broader and fairly systematic restructuring of relations between public and private spheres. The concern with government retrenchment consequently would become one of major factors fostering a re-working of the colonial gender and familial order in 1813. In the absence of adequate funding and sufficient public institutions to accommodate and confine convicts, the state had necessarily to rely upon private provision.

This chapter investigates the schooling experience of working-class children in Portsmouth, Coventry and Leeds from the late nineteenth century to 1939. It focuses on the three activities that dominated a pupil's daily experience of school. For most scholars their school day would consist of class time and the engagement with the curriculum, physical exercise, and extra-curricular activities. All three areas of the school day were fertile ground for planting the seeds of imperial fervour but, then again, the school curriculum could also foster the virtues of industrial discipline. International competition and anxieties over the security of the empire brought the teaching of patriotism to national attention. The 1870 Education Act has often been presented as legislation that imposed educational uniformity to equip Britain for an era of increasing international competition.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses the concept of female gentility as enacted in colonial settings. It considers dress, which is taken to be the most intimate expression of self. The book examines the creation of the living room, a critical space on the basis of which a woman would be judged as to whether she had succeeded in creating a respectable, refined and genteel household. It focuses on gardens and ways in which the spaces contributed to other aspects of genteel performance and how the very physicality of gardening served to foster attachment to site. The book explores food and how the repetitive nature of its sourcing, preparation and presentation generated a multitude of ways for signaling genteel distinction.

This chapter discusses how constructions of landscape spaces were deeply informed by a prevailing interest in scientific representations. At a basic level, the recording of landscape spaces, their topographical characteristics, and botanical and zoological inhabitants contributed to greater scientific knowledge. The map-making impulse had long associations with travellers and provided a bridge between apparently objective renditions of landscape spaces and representations laden with other significances. Mapping was not necessarily confined to landscape spaces; seas and coasts could also furnish vital information which could be used in furthering the processes of strategic planning and colonial settlement. William Hodges's View of Table Mountain from Table Bay is an important example of British scientific curiosity being co-opted to record the reality of the landscape spaces of southern Africa. Books of travel became popular points of reference for the domestic and colonial audiences who had access to them.

British leaders were astonishingly slow in grappling with the problem of determining a new international boundary line. The partition was to be perceived as a South Asian undertaking, with British officials acting only as steady and impartial guides. The Radcliffe commission was clearly concerned with delimitation, not demarcation; demarcation was left to India and Pakistan, after independence. Despite Cyril Radcliffe's central role in the boundary-making process, few historians have offered more than a cursory appraisal of Radcliffe the individual. As Radcliffe prepared for his voyage to India, the British Government began to speed up its withdrawal. On 4 July 1947, the government introduced an Indian Independence Bill in the British House of Commons. This bill included a clause that ultimately rendered Radcliffe's decision binding on both India and Pakistan.

This chapter discusses the ways in which the particular circumstances of cocoa farming in Nigeria, particularly the colonial context, have had an impact on Nigerian women. It considers how they have actively carved out their own roles within the developing cash crop economy. The chapter provides a way into a transnational analysis of women at different stages in the production of cocoa: handling the raw material in Nigeria and transforming this into Rowntree-branded confectionery in Britain. It explores how an analysis of cocoa production demands recognition of the intersections between capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism, and the effects of such structures on women's lives. Before the establishment of the West African industry, women in South and Central America, and in the Caribbean, were already involved in diverse ways in the production and sale of cocoa to the western market.

The hospital movement of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries in northern Italy provides a lens through which to view the transformation of political power, religious life, and the social agency of urban citizens of the region. Traditional definitions of poverty and need, as well as suggestions of a Christian's responsibility to such need, no longer satisfied city-dwellers who saw a much greater demand and variety of suffering in their community than ever before. Communal need and institutional neglect led to the emergence of the medieval hospital as a widespread institutional phenomenon that served as a nexus of charitable activity, religious life, political access and social mobility. In the fourteenth century, multiple crises led to a further challenge to the ability of the laity to continue their control of hospital leadership.