In the geo-politics of empire from the 1770s to the 1830s, the northeast was undergoing a period of transition, in which a zone of indeterminacy became an edge, and a barrier became incorporated into a known region. Cherrapunji thus became a distinctive landmark, a node in the imperial network. At an intimate and personal level, the Khasi Hills were becoming a domesticated destination and end point as much as a staging post and site of transience. The regional subtleties of climate in India may not have been fully understood either by the London Missionary Society (LMS) or the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS). The Khasi Hills were something altogether different and unexpected. 'The tranquillity of the borders', asserted Francis Jenkins, 'can only be effectually and economically provided for, by maintaining our ascendancy in the Hills'.

Advertisements in establishment papers such as the Illustrated London News represent the corporate companies as bringers of so-called progress and development. For corporate companies who had clearly benefited from systems of imperial preference, the process of decolonisation in many parts of the Empire brought uncertainty. The representation of neo-colonialism through modernisation theory is apparent in all the images corporate firms. The creation of an indigenous elite, which would take over the reins of authority without destroying the economic interests of major firms, was a deliberate policy of both the colonial government and British companies working towards political decolonisation. The image of industrial development in Africa appears in advertisements as early as 1954 and expresses unequivocal support for the project of modernity. The actions of the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) indicate the way in which British efforts to 'modernise' Africa were neither benign nor neutral.

The north-east was an important node in shaping ideologies of colonial science. Scientific explorations between Sylhet, the Khasi Hills and Assam constructed knowledge of the economic potential of natural resources, which in their turn helped to build power and feed the British Empire in India and beyond. The surveys of the Khasi Hills that informed road engineering or military movements also elicited a range of narratives in which ideals of science, race and empire. The Indian north-east that was constructed through this period was a novel place; part of what Matthew Edney has called the 'geographical rhetoric of British India'. According to Nathaniel Wallich, John Gibson would have been glad to send his harvest of orchids 'forests and all if he could'. The vast majority of the plants in the Linnean Society's East India Herbarium catalogued as having come from Sylhet, Pandua, Cachar and Khasi Hills were sourced in Cherrapunji.

This chapter focuses on the visual responses to the First of June as a case study for the ways in which Britain's identity as an imperial nation began to be shaped through visual culture. It argues that the unprecedented array of visual responses to the First of June set the stage for a battle of representational modes and aesthetic strategies that would play out over the course of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The chapter aims to refine an approach to the nexus of art, spectacle and maritime concerns in several ways. The occlusion of the naval panorama's relationship to marine painting is no doubt due to the peripheral status to which maritime visual culture has been relegated in relation to mainstream art history. Robert Barker's advertisement establishes a continuum between the panorama and other representations of naval engagements, and marks its difference.

Chapter 4 looks into ways in which agency is exercised within civil society with particular focus on manifestations of compliance and resistance. The authors claim that despite the power imbalances, the agency still manages to find its way in both active and post-conflict zones. They identify different ways in which this agency is manifested in the three settings that they discuss: Jammu and Kashmir, Cyprus and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Jammu and Kashmir they give examples of youth protesting against the police, and parents' associations which use constitutional rights to introduce the change. In Cyprus, they discuss non-compliance to the EU trade regulations which were meant to foster interdependence on a divided island. In case of Bosnia, they examine acts of everyday resistance to ethnic segregation which was imposed by the peace accord. The authors stress the important role that power politics play in such settings and conclude that it is necessary to analyze how power is shaped and perceived through interactions of various actors in the setting.

This chapter explores how, by the end of the nineteenth century, the development of civic identity and a growth of a popular local patriotism became fused, at key moments, with grand imperial adventures. It challenges recent studies that suggest that working-class patriotism during the Boer War was simply the product of imperial values disseminated by a hegemonic state. The chapter explores patriotism at the provincial level and assesses how local agencies such as municipal culture, the press and civic ceremony helped shaped identity during an imperial war. Volunteer or 'citizen soldiers' were derived from core groups established especially to serve in the Boer War that raised men from inside and outside the Volunteer movement. The first generation of historians to challenge the orthodox notion of deep-rooted working-class patriotism argued that the jingoism evident during the Boer War actually represented middle-class enthusiasm for empire.

Indian railroads fostered a political and socio-cultural revolution. The metal arteries played a very important part in India's development and, in particular, in Punjab's rural economy. Until 1854 engineering works carried out by the British in India were under the charge of the Royal Engineers. One of the most noted engineers of the mid-nineteenth century was John Pitt Kennedy. The work of Irish engineers and their British colleagues was to transform Punjab physically, economically and politically for generations. In that context the Punjab irrigation schemes can be seen as an expression of British imperial hegemony and accounts for the increased prestige of professional irrigation engineers in India at this time. In 1882, F. W. Maunsell of St Columba's, Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) and Cooper's Hill worked on inundation canals on the Lower Sutlej and on the West Jumna canal as assistant first grade.

The final decades of the nineteenth century marked a revolution in deep-ocean transport. Steam had been in use in shipping early in the century. With particular reference to the British settler societies in the western Pacific, histories of transport and empire have emphasised the vertical lines of connection with the imperial metropole. The integrated approach promises much for histories of maritime transport and empire. The most prominent voices are those of well-connected, middle-class European men bent on securing the profitability of an expanding shipping empire. There are a number of comprehensive business histories of the main regional shipping companies, including the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand (USSCo.), the Sydney-based Burns Philp and Company and the Matson Line of San Francisco. Steamer days were concentrated periods of activity in ports, giving the embodied, material expression to transcolonial interdependencies.