The 'punk poetry' of John Cooper Clarke displays a keen awareness of its environment. This chapter argues that punk developed aesthetic forms ideally placed to articulate environmental injustice, forms epitomised and extended by Cooper Clarke. Roy Bullock's collation of newspaper stories from the Salford City Reporter documents the city in the years from Cooper Clarke's birth to the onset of punk and the beginnings of his performing career. With his surrealism churning up the 'hidden ground' of urban environmental injustice, Cooper Clarke's work brought social observation back down to earth. The central insight of environmental injustice is that while the degradation of the physical landscape runs parallel to that of the built environment, more fundamentally, material, metabolic processes connect human with nonhuman. In any conception of environmental injustice, key signifiers therefore will be the physical environment, the built environment and, especially, human health.

This chapter analyses the exhibition of Indian art as a 'thick' cultural experience, to use Clifford Geertz's word, explore its multiple and contradictory representations of British imperial identity. George Curzon insisted on distinct boundaries between Indian and British cultural identities. Curzon's own pose as gentlemanly capitalist combined with the exhibition's purpose to exonerate Britain of its role in the decline of Indian art production. The notion of gentleman capitalists, made it impossible to seal off Indian culture from global market demands and modern technologies. The 1903 exhibition had special importance for Curzon. The exhibition defined British and Indian imperial identities as complementary and oppositional: Indians, artisanal and local; British, technologically advanced and global. The press in India was a vociferous critic of Curzon's policies, the durbar, and the exhibition, identifying Curzon with an intention to push India backwards rather than forwards.

This chapter offers a comparison of two novels that share a surprising number of features, and which both have strong links with aesthetic theory. The first is The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, by Lady Morgan, which was first published in 1806 and is the most self-consciously picturesque novel ever written. The second is Sybil, or the Two Nations by Benjamin Disraeli, from 1845, which has a Gothic revivalist slant. In The Wild Irish Girl the two protagonists' identities belong to two nations: the Irish and the British, or more specifically the Irish Catholics and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. By the time that Sybil was published, the Reform Bill had widened the franchise a little, and the Act of Toleration had put Roman Catholicism on a better footing. Disraeli configured the problem with the mindset of his day.

Sir Cyril Radcliffe's reputation as a great legal mind may have been a compelling factor for the nationalist leaders, many of them lawyers themselves, who endorsed his selection for the crucial boundary commission post. Mountbatten made clear to Radcliffe in their early meetings that it was absolutely necessary to have a boundary line drawn before the transfer of power took place. Both Congress and Muslim League leaders perceived Radcliffe as impartial, in large part because he had never been a member of the Indian Civil Service. Radcliffe's Indian experience reinforced, rather than shook, his sympathy for imperialist values and actions. Radcliffe's writings also demonstrate that his time in India strengthened his imperialist leanings. The British Government's later use of Radcliffe showed it to be satisfied with his work in India. Radcliffe played a central role in a violent historical episode of India and Pakistan.

The introduction discusses the existing literature on colonial officials in Africa, and argues that, as a result of the relative paucity of such literature, there are four particularly pressing historiographical issues that require addressing if the attitudes underpinning the collective actions of the colonial state are to be understood. These are 1) the extent to which colonial officials acted in accordance with metropolitan attitudes to empire and imperial duty, 2) the role that selfishness and selflessness played in the act of imperial governance, 3) the degree to which officials envisaged their actions as taking place within supra- and intra-colonial collective networks of camaraderie and shared attitudes, and 4) the validity of postcolonialist arguments as to ambiguity and ambivalence at the heart of the imperial mission. The introduction also provides a brief summary of the arguments that are to follow in the remainder of the book.

This chapter considers the ways in which the religious beliefs of Irish and Scottish migrants reflected their homeland origins. It explores the ethnic societies established by the Irish and the Scots, arguing that the political issues preoccupied a number of Irish societies in New Zealand. While the poetry of Scots in New Zealand contained references to historical personages in Scotland, most mention was found in the Scottish ethnic press published in New Zealand. A good deal of discussion about Irish politics appears in the records of Irish ethnic associations and the Irish ethnic press (the Green Ray and Tribune) rather than in personal testimonies. The depiction of Scottish history in the ethnic press sets it apart from the manifestations of Scottishness evident in other sources such as personal correspondence and shipboard journals.

This chapter argues that, contrary to the argument invariably made by historians, support for indirect rule was not simply rooted in an obsession with the idea that Africa was fragile and unable to cope with the changes Britain was inflicting upon it. Africa was thought able to adapt to much, and would even eventually accommodate certain governmental innovations to which it was not naturally predisposed. It would seem that the appeal of indirect rule to officials lay partly in the promise that it would be restorative (in that it had the capacity to repair some of the damage already done by social and economic change) rather than preventative (in that it was needed to forestall the empire’s collapse).Besides such genuine concerns for the efficacy of the colonial state, it would also appear that self-interest shaped officials’ support for indirect rule. It was thus the conjunction of state and personal interests that account for indirect rule’s emergence as the orthodoxy of the interwar period.

This chapter focuses on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's interest in Ireland and his eventual visit there in 1936. The Irish representative, Charles Bewley, thought one such visit he had from Bose, in April 1934, significant enough to report on to Dublin. Bose's intention to visit Ireland finally reached the public domain via a short report in the Irish Times on 25 January 1936. From the formation of an Irish-style Volunteer Force in Calcutta in 1928, to the propaganda campaign to gain recognition for Indian independence in the mid-1930s, Ireland was an evident influence on Bose throughout his life. Bose's story is representative of the lesser-known radical, aggressive and revolutionary road to Indian independence, one that is the antithesis of the world-renowned, Gandhi-inspired, non-violent struggle against the Raj. He died unexpectedly and relatively young.

This chapter argues that Victorian naval reforms forced the navy to improve lower-deck conditions in order to recruit more men. It explains how and why the navy expanded in the nineteenth century, and then how this expansion affected manpower and personnel reforms. As the responsibilities of the navy had broadened in the forty years after the Napoleonic Wars, technological advances made the modernisation of the British fleet possible. The chapter focuses upon the passage of the Continuous Service Act, which effectively introduced a standing navy, the challenges of raising and meeting manning levels by recruiting from the merchant marine, and the training of boys for service. Public celebrations of the navy increased amidst the imperial and domestic challenges of the new Edwardian age. It examines the rationale and development of lower-deck reforms in pay, pensions and promotions over the course of the late-Victorian and Edwardian period.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the British influence on the life and history of Punjab, the province regarded as British India's 'greatest success story'. It examines the social, religious, ethnic and educational backgrounds of Irish recruits to the three services: the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the Indian Medical Service (IMS) and the Indian Public Works Department (PWD). The book also examines the reasons behind the remarkable increase in Irish recruitment beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. It compares the experiences and backgrounds of Irishmen recruited to serve in other British possessions in Asia with those of their counterparts in India. British and Irish public servants could hardly participate in domestic Indian politics but they influenced such politics in various ways.