An informative account of an Imperial flight by an inexperienced air traveller appeared in the Field in the summer of 1935. An Imperial ticket bought some comfort and security, but not lightning speed. The Imperial Airways Chairman, Sir Eric Geddes, was adamant that speed was a secondary consideration for many Empire travellers. Air services were beginning to choreograph imperialism, especially in places not yet touched by mechanised land transport. In 1932, a disillusioned South African reckoned that Imperial was unlikely to have its passenger contract renewed in Central and Southern Africa. Whimsy percolated an article published in 1939 in the Journal of the Royal African Society about 'the romance' of the air mail to Africa. Like the African airway, the new air route to India was an irresistible subject for writers.

This chapter explores what occasioned the change in attitude towards the natural sciences. It considers what prompted Spaniards, and particularly the Spanish Crown to embrace the study of nature. The book examines how eighteenth-century Spaniards construed the resurgence of natural history in the Spanish Empire as a continuation of an existing scientific tradition that had flourished with particular brilliance in the sixteenth century. It also explores some of the obstacles that would-be naturalists had to surmount in order to accrue respect and recognition. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the naturalist could hope for a more dignified legacy, perhaps being honoured with a suitable monument, or, at the very least, lending Jose Cadalso's name to a new species of plant. The remarkable thing about the Pineda monument was less its grandeur than its novelty.

This part provides different definitions of paternalism that political philosophers employ. Based on an extended analysis of the caretaker thesis and the liberation thesis, the part argues that parental power often is not paternalistic. Parents exercise their power in ways that are not paternalistic. The concept of paternalism focuses on both the nature of power and also the role of the philosopher in considering its legitimacy.

A zamindar was originally a revenue gatherer who, under the British, became a landlord. During the early part of the nineteenth century the Sikhs had tightened and expanded their hold on Punjab. When the British became rulers of Punjab, they immediately sought to appease military and landed interests. A large part of Punjab was transformed by massive irrigation schemes during the period 1881-1921 from a desert waste, or, at best, pastoral savannah, into one of the major centres of commercial agriculture in South Asia. The Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1901 was followed by an attempt in 1906 to bring in legislation which would more strictly control various aspects of cultivators' use of land in the new canal colonies. Favouritism by the British towards certain groups strengthened their influence in the countryside as well as reinforcing tribal cohesion.

The struggle to reconcile the narratives of darkness and light that surround child rescue has bedevilled many of the recent enquiries into the legacy of out-of-home care. Changing trends in publishing have, from the latter part of the twentieth century, created an opportunity for the survivors of out-of-home care to tell their stories. The image of the 'proper family' haunts many survivor accounts. Despite their adherence to the family model, few settings were able to reproduce the affective ties that the children were seeking. Child rescue's emphasis on the need for discipline added to the harshness of institutional life. The disclosure of widespread institutional abuse has led to some caution amongst child welfare authorities, but it has done little to suppress the urge to rescue amongst a public confronted with stories of family dysfunction.

The book traces strands of the various dialects and idioms assumed by the 'languages of representation', and their visual and aesthetic equivalents, in the course of the British evaluation of southern Africa. It moves roughly chronologically from the period before formal British control was established, through early-nineteenth-century travelling and description of the Cape Colony to mid-nineteenth-century concerns about migration, missionary activity and hunting. The book explores the variegated meaning of 'landscape' in this non-European context. It assesses how particular forms of engagement with landscapes, driven by different motivational factors, influenced landscape representation and description of southern Africa before the middle of the nineteenth century. The book discusses the employment of aesthetic and scientific theories of landscape description and depiction to further specific representational ends. It describes the way in which representational techniques were deployed by a variety of users and for a range of audiences.

The naval temperance movement was not singular in revealing the clear class dimensions in the portrayal of naval manhood. Analysing the class implications of representing naval manhood serves as a useful way to understand the domestic formation of imperial manhood. Samuel Smiles' conception of the social order reflected a bourgeois definition of manhood and a gendered conception of class. To Smiles, the 'heroism' of the common 'private' and 'men in the ranks' not only contributed to Britain's military success, it highlighted the working man's ability to better himself. The title of William Henry Giles Kingston later story, From Powder Monkey to Admiral, originally published in 1879 in the first issues of The Boy's Own Paper, charted the perseverance and success of a common boy in Nelson's navy. Although mobility occurred within Nelson's navy where promotion was awarded in battle, it proved increasingly elusive within the late Victorian and Edwardian navy.

This chapter builds upon the work of scholars who have recognised the power of landscape and its representation to bring together economic, social, political and aesthetic values, alloying them in complex and interconnected ways. It deals, in general, with the written records, both published and unpublished, left by a variety of people associated with the British social, scientific and political engagement with southern Africa. The chapter assesses more accurately the modes and means of representing southern African landscape. However, it is useful to reflect on how and why the acts of representation took place and the roles that they fulfilled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for both travellers and audiences alike. One of the aspects of visual culture that accorded closely with travellers' experiences of landscape was the act of creating maps. Many of the descriptions analysed in this chapter were circulated in the context of travel writing.

This chapter examines the place of Arthurian myth in aspects of British culture c.1850-1940. The discussion focuses in particular on Edward Burne-Jones in order to establish a critical appreciation of such work as part of much wider considerations relating to the place of myth in modern Britain. The Arthurian mediaeval corpus was inescapably pluralist and contradictory. The truth of Arthur lies in emotional or spiritual coherence, not historicist understanding. For Burne-Jones the history in the abstract means taking the long view, understanding the course of historical events through the contemplation of epochs. Burne-Jones's involvement with Arthur started early. His painting, The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, had been worked on for seventeen years and went through numerous revisions, as Burne-Jones refined his design.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book examines the nature and significance of steamship transport in the history of the colonial Pacific. It draws a wide range of people, spaces and experiences into an extended analysis of a new world of mobility and exchange. The book presents the analysis of steamshipping away from the imperial metropole and out into the Pacific. It approaches the history of the ship primarily through maritime working cultures. The book demonstrates how the micro-geographies of the ship were meaningful in the larger-scale political, economic and cultural constructions of maritime regionalism. To craft less linear, inevitable and more negotiated and complex histories of technology, imperial power and social change, the book argues for a closer engagement of the histories of transport and empire with those of New Zealand and the Pacific.

The growing fleet of Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand (USSCo.) ships became iconic expressions of New Zealand's maturing identity as a modern maritime power in the South Pacific. Company officials were concerned with authenticity and accuracy. This demonstrated a certain respect for Maori culture and heritage, linking an idealised and romanticised indigenous past to a technologically progressive future. Christening ships remains an important maritime tradition, a ritual that bestows a sense of individuality to each vessel. Ships were sometimes given Australian Aboriginal names, while a new series of vessels built especially for the tropical trades were named after islands in the Pacific. The decorative features of Maoriland included an enthusiasm for indigenous nomenclature and material culture. When New Zealand commissioned a battle-cruiser in 1910, the Zealandia was coined to rename a ship called New Zealand and release that name for the new vessel.

This chapter will argue that, in contrast with the usual argument that officials worked effectively alongside one another, bound by fraternal sentiments fostered in large part by the public school system, the colonial services of Africa were in fact riven with tensions along a number of axes, including age and different approaches to governance. Most significant of these, however, was officials’ ongoing search for individualistic self-fulfillment untrammelled by the endeavours and attitudes of others. Whilst many recognised that socialising was essential to their morale, many officials simultaneously resented the constraints that being a member of a small, inward-looking, and gossip-driven European community placed upon them. Public schools therefore failed in their efforts to inculcate all with a sense of an esprit de corps amongst Britain’s overseas officials.

This chapter shows how Penelope and Arachne resisted a limiting mythographical moralisation through a successful association of gender, political agency and intellectual observation on the stage. It focuses on the re-emergence of the weavers' political function and work in Jacobean drama. The study of Penelope and Arachne necessitates avoiding the trap of seeing early modern imitation as a purely dialectical destruction of antique exempla. Early modern critique is directed at the moralisation of the myths and not at the myths themselves. Hence, the chapter offers a heuristic approach, looking beneath the mythographical cloth of a silent exemplarity so as to retrieve the political 'voice of the shuttle'. It also shows how theatre enables the mythical weavers to retrieve their agency thanks to female characterisation. The chapter further projects the concept of a 'balancing act' out of the strictly domestic sphere by confronting Penelope with her 'bolder face', Arachne.

This chapter explores the issue of working-class and middle-class patriotism during the war from a rather different perspective. It argues that both standard accounts of war enthusiasm fail to focus sufficiently on the important local contexts that shaped the dissemination of war and imperial propaganda. The contention that the First World War had an extraordinary impact on social relations in England continues to influence current historiography. The chapter suggests the case that local contexts were significant in shaping the recruitment strategies that called men to fight for their nation and empire. During the initial stages of the First World War, Portsmouth, Leeds and Coventry all appear to have been consumed with their own particular civic issues that appeared to take precedence over initial recruitment campaigns. Whereas working-class recruits were expected to join Kitchener's New Army, new exclusive local Pals or City battalions were formed to attract middle-class volunteers.