This chapter highlights the careers of Save the Children’s principal field officer in Nigeria, Lieutenant-Commander A. R. Irvine Neave and the African Development Trust’s, Guy and Molly Clutton-Brock to explore the legacies of mission and empire. The former viewed poverty as a product of individual ignorance; the latter argued that it was due to the structural injustice of racist legislation across Southern Africa. Despite these differing imperial and political outlooks, both were, however, ‘techno-missionaries’: products of both the missionary past and the technocratic future of development. Mission stayed on after the empire, but it was transformed by the rise of the modern NGO and the humanitarian agencies such as Oxfam, Save the Children and Christian Aid. It resulted in a ‘third colonial occupation’ of volunteer aid workers alongside the experts and technocrats of social and economic development.

Chapter 3 introduces a new genre of fiction, the Wales novel. Wales novels were set in the Principality, featured Welsh heroines and heroes, and cast Wales as simultaneously the morally and culturally pure cradle of imperial Britishness and, paradoxically, as Britain’s first and final colony. In them, the country becomes the proposed space for experimentation with new methods of colonial discipline and extraction and the site of a proposed recolonization of the British heartland that promised to reinvigorate and purify the Empire as a whole. These fictions, written or satirized by all of the decade’s most famous novelists, were among the best-selling and most critically celebrated works of the period. The chapter concludes with an investigation of the critical reception and generic influence of the Wales novel in the late 1780s, spotlighting several exceptionally interesting deviations from the rapidly consolidating hallmarks of the genre.

Chapter 4 shows how, as the Wales novel congealed into a stable genre, it began to confront the knotty problem of race. The notorious economic underdevelopment of Wales posed a problem to Scottish Enlightenment-inspired anthropologists who cast climate and religion as the determinants of standardized, stadial socioeconomic progress. Such theories failed to account for the wealth gap between Wales and England, since Wales’s climate was mostly identical to England’s and Wales had come to be understood as the heartland of British Protestantism. As authors struggled to explain Welsh impoverishment, they became increasingly willing to use race to figure the Welsh as different from Anglo-Britons in kind, rather than in degree of social development. Some authors contended that the Welsh were “negroes,” “savages,” and “men of copper,” who deviated from a phenotypically white Britishness, while others insisted they were the progenitors of a pure race destined to rule the world.

Chapter 5 explores the conspicuous absence of a Romantic Welsh national novel patterned after the fictions of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott. Reading over a dozen “failed” attempts at producing such books, the chapter argues that the unique position of Wales did not furnish it with the materials necessary for a conventional bardic nationalist novel. Edgeworth’s and Scott’s spectacular commodification of national cultural difference could not be made to work in the Welsh case. Where Edgeworth’s Irish and Scott’s Scottish trade politically independent but doomed identities for a cultural nationalism that is, above all, reconcilable with a capacious imperial Britishness, the Welsh had no such option, since Welshness was and had been synonymous with (ancient) Britishness for centuries. What was at stake in Welsh national fictions was instead the definition of Britishness itself.

Chapter 2 demonstrates that the Principality played a key role in the invention of novel understandings of the history of the British Empire. While historians like David Hume linked modern Wales with pre-Roman Britain in order to confer upon modern Britain a dubious anti-colonial pedigree, and to equate Britishness with a love of liberty, they also figured the English conquest of Wales as a necessary precondition for the establishment of British imperial power. Seizing upon this hypocrisy, antiquaries like Henry Rowlands insisted that the English were foreign interlopers who had nearly destroyed native British culture. Midcentury writers like Thomas Gray and Edmund Burke sought to suture this rift by contending that ancient Britain, and its modern descendant Wales, were crucial political and aesthetic resources for Britain’s imperial future, but some Jacobins, like Iolo Morganwg, instead portrayed Wales as an insurgent anti-imperial power waiting to unmake the British Empire from within.

Queer and trans of color critique engages the ways sexuality and gender themselves gain meaning in the context of systems of racial differentiation and, reciprocally, how struggles for justice, abolition, freedom, and decolonization must attend to sexuality and gender as both vectors of domination and sites of liberatory imagination and expression. This chapter considers how attributions of savagery, criminality, and inassimilable alienness to racialized populations in the United States are shaped by narratives of these groups’ inability to enact proper gender and sexuality. The chapter further considers how queer and trans of color critique addresses the specificities in how particular racialized groups are defined through systems of sexual and gender normativity and how they have engaged those systems in multidimensional ways, attending to queer and trans work in Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, and Indigenous studies. It traces differences and disagreements within those fields and tracks dialogues among/across them.

When thinking about the world outside of “the West,” scholarship can fall into generalizing frameworks in which comparison with the West predominates or in which the world is divided up into somewhat homogenized “areas.” How can we reckon with the effects and ongoing histories of imperialism and occupation, uneven transnational dynamics of exploitation and extraction, and racial capitalism while not understanding those subjected to oppression and domination as merely passive in the face of those processes? How do we engage with forms of difference while understanding them as multidimensional, permeable, as opposed to essentialized expressions of local/national/regional culture? How do we attend to forms of place-based specificity while engaging the heterogeneity and diversity of the area, country, and/or population under discussion and while also addressing dynamic relations with other peoples and places – both chosen and coerced? This chapter considers how queer and trans studies have taken up these challenges.

This chapter analyses the relationship between religion, state-formation, and nationalism. The focus is on the transformation of collective subjectivities in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds. By zooming in on case studies of the Ottoman empire and Turkey, the chapter analyses what role religious and state institutions play in the development of distinct nationalist projects. Since both religion and nationhood were key sources of political legitimacy, the chapter explores how these are two distinct types of collective subjectivities reconciled in the social and political spheres. The chapter investigates the inherent tensions between the universalist doctrines of Sunni Islam and the unambiguous particularism of modern nationalist projects in Turkey.

This chapter explores the role of golden age narratives in nationalism. By focusing on case studies of late nineteenth- and early twenty-first-century south-eastern European societies, the author explains how and why images of the mythical past are articulated differently in the two historical periods. The chapter argues that in the nineteenth century, golden age rhetoric was mostly a top-down phenomenon centred on transforming the Balkan peasantry into loyal members of their new nation-states. By the early twenty-first century this process had reached its institutional limits and the golden age narratives had become a bottom-up phenomenon: the key agents of their creation and dissemination are members of civil society, social movements, and ordinary people. The chapter focuses on the structural processes that underpin this change to explain the historical dynamics of nationalisms.

This chapter explores the relationship between imperial and national subjectivities. Empires have dominated the planet for thousands of years, but in a relatively short period of time they have been completely delegitimised by national projects. Hence, this chapter aims to explain how and why this has happened. Using historical examples of Japanese and Hungarian nation-formation, the chapter traces the transformation of local and religiously based subjectivities into nation-centric subjectivities.

In this chapter the role of (nationalist) agency in the collapse of imperial order is questioned. Drawing on the primary archival research, the chapter zooms in on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian rule (1878–1918). The chapter contests the view that the imperial state was severely undermined by the presence of strong nationalisms. It also challenges the notion that most of the Bosnian population remained ‘nationally indifferent’ during this period. Instead, the chapter argues that understanding the character of Austro-Hungarian rule is a much better predictor of social change that took place in this period. Rather than stifling supposedly vibrant nationalisms or operating amidst widespread national indifference, the imperial state played a decisive role in forging the nation-centric world through its inadvertent homogenisation of discontent.

The chapter situates children’s poetry within the print culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how such poetry provides insights into the shift from a reliance on British practices and literary models to a sense of literary distinctiveness and independence. It discusses how early alphabet books developed literacy as well as inculcated social and political values. It also considers how some children’s verse disseminated the trope of the lost child in the bush, while other verse familiarised children with the Australian environment. It discusses the emergence of fairy and fantasy worlds based on distinctly Australian settings following World War I, and a growing depiction of Australian progress. The chapter discusses the pedagogic role of school readers and their role in mediating continuing connections to Britain and a specifically Australian identity. The chapter also discusses the significance of columns for children in periodicals, and how their encouragement of children to write which led to the rise of a number of child poets.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the British Empire was threatened by nationalist insurrection in the colonies and by US–Soviet competition for global supremacy. Over the next three decades, the loss of over fifty overseas possessions problematized the country’s dominant narrative of national identity, much of it centered on the wealth and power accumulated by empire. The complex cultural responses to decolonization were typified in literature. On the one hand, diasporic authors from the Global South developed a powerful strand of anti-imperial commentary, illustrated by the work of Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, Andrew Salkey, Attia Hosain, and Grace Nichols. On the other hand, several generations of (largely) white, middle-class English writers stuck to the imperial attitudes of the past, condemning indigenous revolt in the colonies (Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, P. H. Newby) and objecting to immigration into the metropolis (John Braine, Anthony Burgess, Margot Bennett). While postimperial fiction existed, most famously in novels by George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Colin MacInnes, postcolonial commentary would have a much greater impact on literary treatments of empire and identity in the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

The Russo-Japanese War makes several contributions to the dialogue between the historical record and the theory of war. First, it shows how war due to commitment problems requires not only shifting power but also a state’s inability or unwillingness to control its power. In this case, Russian uncertainty over Japan’s willingness to fight explains both the outbreak of war and Russia’s expansion into Manchuria in the first place. Second, it shows how fighting can make commitments credible that weren’t beforehand: by disabusing Russia of its optimism about war with Japan. Third, the modern theory of war can explain why Japan’s share of the peace settlement didn’t reflect its dominant military performance: The deal reflected the likely outcome of a fight to the finish, pitting Japanese military superiority against Russian access to credit. Finally, the war’s outcome – Russian weakness and subsequent recovery – is a proximate cause of World War I.

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and its aftermath presents a challenge to systemic-level International Relations theories about the relationship between economic interdependence and war. Critiquing that literature and turning instead to the domestic level, the chapter shows how Chinese and Japanese conceptions of the relationship between economics and security – first developed in response to the crisis of nineteenth-century Western imperial coercion in East Asia, and later amplified in the context of Cold War East Asia – fused the Chinese and Japanese economies in the lead up to, during, and in the decades following the Second Sino-Japanese War. In so doing, the chapter demonstrates that economic interdependence between China and Japan has grown explosively during, after, and because of war, and that perceptions of insecurity have motivated closer economic ties between China and Japan.