This chapter translates the vivid description of the life of the noble lord Wiprecht of Groitzsch. It then offers a very different perspective on Henry IV and Henry V's reigns than the typical pro-Salian or pro-Saxon narrative sources. For understanding the political, social, religious and economic developments in the region between Saxony and Bohemia during the early twelfth century, it is a rich, almost unparalleled source. Wiprecht of Groitzsch has earned a reputation in modern scholarship as the social climber par excellence of the late Salian period. The turning point in Wiprecht's career seems to have been Henry IV's first Italian campaign during the early 1080s; according to the Deeds, Wiprecht led the Czech contingent alongside Czech king Vratislav's young son, Borivoj. Thereafter, Wiprecht of Groitzsch would be an increasingly prominent player in Saxon and imperial politics until his death.

Proselytism was officially frowned upon in the Indian Empire. Conversion from one religion to another was highly political and potentially explosive. The Wesleyan missionaries' teetotalism and modest stipends separated them from colonial neighbours. World War I disturbed a period of relative calm in Upper Burma. The Wesleyan missionaries were relatively ignorant about rural politics and were generally less sympathetic. The Wesleyans were perplexed because pongyis were poisoning the minds of ordinary 'Burman Buddhists'. Even the American Baptists were shaken by Buddhist truculence in the towns. The Hsaya San rebellion broke out in Lower Burma at the end of December 1930. The Marxist-dominated All Burma Students' Union (ABSU) and Dobama Asiayone (We Burmans) expanded rapidly during the 1930s. Dobama had begun as a student political movement in 1933 but quickly embraced industrial workers and cultivators.

The journey to India and the initial move towards the first place of settlement meant the beginning of an itinerant life for missionaries and scholars. The arrival of railways made travelling within India easier and quicker. The greatest problem facing the Germans who travelled to nineteenth-century India was the environment. Despite the problems encountered upon first arriving in India, especially by the missionaries, the various elite German groups made attempts to reconstruct the type of housing in which they had resided in Europe. The type of work which the missionaries carried out divides into a series of categories, broadly defined as preaching, administrating, teaching, healing, researching and providing industrial work. Some missionaries spent most of their lives in India, where they died, often prematurely, as a result of the contraction of a tropical disease.

Many clerics who sympathised with Sinn Féin and who wished to see Ireland become an independent republic were nonetheless vociferous in condemning IRA violence. The discouragement of violence was thus an important aspect of the clergy’s traditional political alignment. This goal was pursued principally by exerting moral pressure on Irish Catholics through denunciation. This chapter examines public clerical condemnation of the IRA campaign. It looks first at its incidence, showing that priests condemned IRA violence more often as it became more frequent up to the last quarter of 1920, when denunciations dropped as British violence became harsher. The chapter also analyses the means by which clerics communicated their message and examines its contents. It shows that specific tropes of condemnation were established in the aftermath of the Soloheadbeg ambush.

This chapter seeks to achieve a number of things and to develop a niche in the ever-expanding literature relating to imperialism, society and culture. It concentrates on the subject of ephemera as a concept of display, more firmly embedding ephemera studies into the literature relating to the British Empire and popular culture than has been the case to date. The chapter examines the Bodleian Library's John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera and the manner in which its material can be used to investigate imperial themes. It offers insights into the types of imperial and wider world themes encountered in different types of ephemeral material. A distinct and sizeable category, scattered throughout the John Johnson Collection, comprises material related to the emigration of Britons to the settler colonies. An example of a common theme encountered in ephemeral material is that of the native porter, servant or labourer and the white leader.

This chapter constructs a social history of settler Kenya through the prism of the colonial family. Embedding the lives of the mentally ill within a critical account of the family and the home in settler culture, the chapter aims to place one of the most powerful symbols of the settler colony in new relief. The chapter also adds depth and texture to the intersecting themes of gender and class that in Kenya underpinned the myth of a ‘European race’.

Convict transportation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield agreed, had enabled 'the English' to create 'from their own loins a nation of Cyprians and Turks'. 'Like slavery', penal reformer Joseph Atkinson asserted, transportation had 'the effect of destroying all dignity in labour'. Transportation also appeared to have fostered a direct conflict between colonial interests and the British public good, placing a strain upon imperial relations. The reformers condemned the colonial economic system on the grounds that it stimulated an unnatural and demoralising reliance upon government. By the 1830s, the Colonial Reformers had acquired a marked and growing influence. Colonial conditions had equally unsettled the broader body politic. By the 1830s and 1840s, growing numbers of imperial theorists regarded the empire as a unitary state, a single body politic and the colonies as integral components of a greater British nation.

Power-ridden meanings repeatedly informed understandings of the reformed convict assignment system. Thus convicts were, in addition to being perceived as 'slaves', also imagined as animals in need of taming. Wholesale reform of the system therefore depended upon the state's ability to redirect convicts systematically from their own lodgings or government accommodation. This assault upon the foundations of the convict private sphere was an implicit part of the John Bigge's plan. Ensnared in a web of state regulations and constraints, relationships, families and households had become ever more central to the state's ability to control and discipline convicts. One result of this was that personal and supposedly private issues such as sex, childbirth and marriage were transformed into arenas of conflict and contestation. The new spatial ordering enabled the state to suppress attempts by convicts to work independently or in their own time and thus to enforce a greatly enhanced servitude.