Historians endeavouring to investigate popular engagement with empire have inevitably been drawn to the domain of leisure and recreation. This chapter investigates how the popular entertainment of the late nineteenth century was employed to lure working-class men and women into imperial societies and movements. One indication of the extent to which imperial sentiment penetrated recreation may reside in more informal expressions of popular culture. The astute assessment of a key component of popular culture came at the high-water mark of music hall popularity which had grown from the humble origins of the singing saloons and music recitals of the mid-nineteenth century. Between 1870 and 1890, comic drama, melodrama and music were the most staged forms of entertainment. From the 1890s, issues of empire and imperialism seep more consistently into popular entertainment in Portsmouth, Coventry and Leeds.

The representations of black people demonstrate the value of the social, political and economic contextualisation of imagery and the limitations and uses of stereotyping theory. In the post-war period, as decolonisation became a reality, and immigration from the colonies began to change the face of Britain, consumer advertising stopped using the image of black people to sell products. Advertising as an industry also changed dramatically after 1960, with increasing market segmentation and the development of a more outwardly consumer-oriented society. Many have described the 1960s as the beginnings of a 'post-modern' advertising, an era in which advertising images rapidly change, representing a succession of ever-shifting lifestyles and conflicting perspectives. In the late twentieth century, advertising has certainly become more sophisticated. Advertisers exploited the imperial image and message to sell their products.

Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control, preparing the way for both 'self-determination and the federation of all West African territories'. Although George Padmore offered Pan-African socialism as a distinctive African path towards the future, he was still promoting a pre dominantly Western vision, with no place in it for tribal chiefs. Like more academic modernisation theorists in the 1950s, Padmore believed that the task facing Africans at this historic moment was to transform their traditional societies into modern societies. In 1969, when a small American publisher reissued James Hooker's 1938 book A History of Negro Revolt, retitled A History of Pan-African Revolt, James added to it an epilogue explaining the 'rapid decline of African nationalism'.

Through August 1841, the rains were incessant; 264 inches of rain fell at Cherrapunji, or a staggering twenty-two feet. William Lewin was promoted to Lieutenant in May 1825, and in that year saw service during the First Anglo-Burmese war. On his 1822 voyage to India, Lewin was shocked at the brutal slave economy around the Dutch settlement at Paarl at the Cape Colony. The nature of William and Jane Lewin's presence in Cherrapunji from the early 1830s was unusual. William's long-term invalid status enabled him, Jane and the children to be domiciled there as a family group. Lewin ideas of fatherhood were bound up in a Christian model, and his paternal role was a metaphor of God's own authority. The categories of 'soldier' and 'Christian' might seem contradictory, or perhaps too easily assume the more fixed categorisation of later versions of Christian militarism or of the soldier as popular hero.

The silk textiles of India were and still are, some of the most widely admired and skilfully produced in the world. A huge demand for fine Indian textiles in Europe arose during the seventeenth century. The European market was almost inexhaustible, the demand for cotton textiles particularly appeared to have no limits. The dominant visual characteristic of all the traditional textiles in India, however, was the use of colour. Because silk was accepted as an auspicious and pure material by Hindus, costly woven silk cloth for ritual purposes has always played a prominent part in their textile traditions. Embroidery designs had a great deal in common with woven and printed textiles, often sharing the same motifs and colouring. Merchants were instructed by the East India Company to purchase quilts made in Cambay, and records of 1641 show sales of silk-embroidered quilts and hangings.

This chapter explores the processes through which subcultures are formed and reformed as social groupings with a distinct system of values, norms, behavioural patterns and lifestyle. The punk and skinhead subcultures of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic served to demonstrate that subcultures are not rigid or fixed social formations, but are greatly determined by their historical and cultural context. The form that punk and skinhead culture took in Czechoslovakia was shaped by the repressive character of the prevailing political establishment. Punks and skinheads were associated with each other before 1989 via a simplified subcultural ideology based on resistance to a dominant society represented by the communist regime and an ignorance of their respective subcultural origins. The chapter focuses on subcultural ideology as an analytical category negotiated through and against the norms and values of the dominant society.

The concept of popular imperialism in Britain has stimulated considerable controversy. Kathleen Wilson has charted the significance of aspects of popular imperialism in the eighteenth century and their close relationship with popular politics and the fortunes of administrations and their oppositions during that period. The visibility of empire in other cultural forms can also be presented as having ambiguities which can be stressed by those seeking to deny the existence of a popular imperialism. The whole business of emigration and the information and recruitment mechanisms associated with it have been largely ignored in the discussion of popular imperialism. Emigration statistics are notoriously slippery, but it has been estimated that in the classic age of migration from 1815-1930, the British Isles sent some 18,700,000 people overseas, over one-third of all migrants from Europe.

Manchester School of Art, Macclesfield School of Art and Bradford Technical College provide interesting case studies relating to the debates surrounding design theories. All three schools were concerned with silk production, all three had dynamic tutors who published seminal works on design for artisans, and all three acknowledged the influences of collections of Indian textiles. In 1836 the Central School of Art and Design was founded, followed by a branch in Spitalfields, then the centre of English silk production. In mid-1930s the English silk industry was at a comparative disadvantage as synthetic yarn production rose alarmingly. The particular problems of the global silk industry eventually reduced the chance of Macclesfield developing design education any further. At the mid-point of the nineteenth century, the supremacy of the British textile industry lay in its highly industrialised sectors.