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, the interventions that occurred under the aegis of the CPRC were still intended to be highly visible representations of imperial power; concrete manifestations of Britain’s commitment to modernising its colonial possessions. A vision of modernity for Trinidad was expressed through the construction of chemical and microbiological laboratories furnished with the most up-to-date equipment and, importantly, which functioned as world centres. The CMRI in particular was expected to be a symbol of nascent Trinidadian modernity as it endowed the island with the ability to
South Africa’, in Waltraud Ernst (ed.), Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity , London, Routledge, 2002 , pp. 113–29; Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire , Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004 ; Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily Lynn Osborn and Richard L Roberts (eds.), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees
modernity were undermining social and moral structures was commonplace in the writing of administrators, missionaries and psychiatrists. 16 New colonial states everywhere had argued that Africans should be coerced into the cash economy by universal taxation and, if necessary, forced labour, justified by the assumption that there existed a reservoir of underutilised labour within African societies, where
desire to repatriate mentally ill Nigerians was also supported by medical theories coming out of colonial environments and adopted in the metropole that suggested that black Africans were not psychologically suited for European ‘modernity’ and that the greatest psychological stability for Africans came from being in their own ‘primitive’, traditional environments. At the same time, these patients, as
This book produces a major rethinking of the history of development after 1940 through an exploration of Britain’s ambitions for industrialisation in its Caribbean colonies. Industrial development is a neglected topic in histories of the British Colonial Empire, and we know very little of plans for Britain’s Caribbean colonies in general in the late colonial period, despite the role played by riots in the region in prompting an increase in development spending. This account shows the importance of knowledge and expertise in the promotion of a model of Caribbean development that is best described as liberal rather than state-centred and authoritarian. It explores how the post-war period saw an attempt by the Colonial Office to revive Caribbean economies by transforming cane sugar from a low-value foodstuff into a lucrative starting compound for making fuels, plastics and medical products. In addition, it shows that as Caribbean territories moved towards independence and America sought to shape the future of the region, scientific and economic advice became a key strategy for the maintenance of British control of the West Indian colonies. Britain needed to counter attempts by American-backed experts to promote a very different approach to industrial development after 1945 informed by the priorities of US foreign policy.
’s lasting sorrow. There is no doubt that the relationship with Constance was the most important of his life. His many, lengthy letters to her, posthumously published as Special Delivery (1996) are deeply touching as well as revelatory documents. They make clear not only how entranced James had become by the currents of almost Promethean, revolutionary modernity he discerned emerging in British life
. George Smeeton’s popular Doings in London uses detailed information to convey the historical lineages of London’s modernity. Most striking are the statistics on the capital of companies that collapsed in the financial crisis of 1825. 15 Included ‘as a curious and valuable record of the gullibility of the citizens of this overgrown metropolis’, they simultaneously provide a modern perspective on the
See Roach, Pierson and Chaudhuri, Nation, Empire, Colony . 35 Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge, 1999 ); Clare Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998 ); Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda (eds), Domesticating
insight into the modernization of imperialism and nationalism themselves. And upper-class Anglo-Celtic femininity was an important part of such modernization. In Forever England Alison Light shows, through literary sources, how English culture and patriotism became bound up with domesticity and ‘the private’ at this time. 30 The tour was another representation of such modernity
imperial modernity race came to define the boundaries of progress, as subject peoples were perceived increasingly in terms of rigidified racial hierarchies. In the chapters that follow I explore aspects of this process. To address the field in its entirety is well beyond the limits of a single volume. It would have been legitimate, for example, to examine mutualities between metropolis and colony in the