Imperial expectations and realities
El Dorados, utopias and dystopias
Publication Year: 2015
Published by: Manchester University Press
Cover
Series Info, Series Titles, Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
Founding editor’s introduction
Whatever else may be said about modern imperialism, it was unquestionably a phenomenon which had highly complex motivations arousing intense emotional desires. For the dominant people, it stirred hopes, ambitions, opportunities, all bound up with notions of discovering wealth, albeit in various forms. ...
Acknowledgements
This is my fourth edited volume and without doubt the most seamless, as regards contributions, to put together. This was the case because of the wonderful cast of contributors, who have produced expertly written chapters, to theme and to time. I thank them first and foremost for their work, ...
1. El Dorados, utopias and dystopias in imperialism and colonial settlement
Andrekos Varnava
El Dorado, the enduring myth of a rich promised land hidden in the heartlands of South America, is an appropriate term and metaphor for understanding what is essentially a particular psychology of most imperial and colonial projects. El Dorados as regards imperialism and colonial settlement are supported by promises of immediate enrichment, ...
2. Darién and the psychology of Scottish adventurism in the 1690s
Eric Richards
The Darién project was the infamously aborted Scottish colony in the Isthmus of Panama in the late 1690s. It is commonly regarded as the disastrous precipitant of the Union of Scotland and England in 1707, and has ever since been the subject of nationalist controversy. ...
3. Greek expectations: Britain and the Ionian Islands, 1815–64
Leslie Rogne Schumacher
Britain’s half-century official relationship with the Ionian Islands is a strange case in the history of imperialism. Indeed, it did not fi t an imperial standard, but was rather an ‘amical protectorate’ organized as a theoretically democratic, self-governing federation and overseen by a British Lord High Commissioner ...
4. Bambuk gold: General Faidherbe’s Senegalese chimera
Leland Conley Barrows
By 1858, Governor Louis Faidherbe of Senegal had fulfilled much of the Plan of 1854 that had called for ending Moorish control of the gum trading posts along the Senegal River, abolishing the trade taxes that the leaders of the Mauritanian tribes and other African polities, Fouta-Toro, for instance, ...
5. Salubrity and the survival of the Swan River Colony: health, climate and settlement in colonial Western Australia
Ruth A. Morgan
In his 1873 account of his antipodean travels, Australia, novelist Anthony Trollope described the condition of each colony he visited. He was struck by the ‘beauty of Sydney Harbour’, the ‘pleasant, prosperous’ Adelaide, ‘boastful’ Melbourne, and Queensland’s ‘great sources of wealth – wool, cattle, sugar and gold’.1 ...
6. Germany’s El Dorado in the Pacific: metropolitan representations and colonial realities, 1884 –1914
Holger Droessler
On 18 October 1910, the Sokehs had had enough. Fed up with harsh work conditions and regular violence, two hundred workers on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei took up clubs and rifles to fight against their German overseers. The outraged workers set their bosses running and managed to kill the new German district chief ...
7. A place to speak the ‘language of heaven’? Patagonia as a land of broken Welsh promise
Trevor Harris
At the end of April 1865, Reverend Abraham Matthews, 32, of Llwydcoed, Aberdare, Glamorgan, deep in the coal and iron country of South Wales, was among those about to emigrate to a new Welsh colony in Patagonia, Argentina. A meeting was held in the village chapel to bid him farewell. ...
8. Between heaven and earth: the German Templer colonies in Palestine
Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Felicity Jensz
In 1899 Prince Carl von Urach, Count of Württemberg, announced the establishment of the Society for the Assistance of German Settlers in Palestine (Gesellschaft zur Förderung der deutschen Ansiedlungen in Palästina). Alongside a dozen other Stuttgart notables, including professors, lawyers and a bishop, von Urach founded ...
9. Italy’s sexual El Dorado in Africa
Daniela Baratieri
In February 2011 Silvio Berlusconi, the 75-year-old and longest-serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy, was charged with paying the under-aged Moroccan Karima El Mahroug for sex. Berlusconi also faced charges for abuse of office in that he had arranged to have El Mahroug released from police custody during an incident ...
10. Dreaming in the desert: Libya as Italy’s promised land, 1911–70
Giuseppe Finaldi
In January 1958 a piqued Enrico Mattei complained to a New York Times journalist that Italy’s state oil company ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi), of which he was president, had been brusquely excluded from prospecting in Libya thanks to shady dealings between US firms and Libya’s monarch Idris es-Senussi.1 ...
11. The British Mesopotamian El Dorado: the restoration of the Garden of Eden
Ann Matters
Sir William Willcocks, the well-known British irrigation engineer, whose achievements included the planning and construction of the first Aswan Dam on the river Nile, delivered a speech at the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1909, framing the explanation for his irrigation scheme for the restoration of Mesopotamia in the following terms: ...
12. Shattered images: French Indochina as a failed symbolic resource
John Hennessey
Colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was an enormously complex and multifaceted enterprise. Especially in the case of larger colonies like French Indochina, it is difficult to evaluate the overall ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the colonial project from the standpoint of the colonizing country, since this consisted of many dimensions. ...
A tribute to Eric Richards
John M. MacKenzie
Eric Richards is a commanding figure who has spanned two distinct, but related, scholarly areas of history. These are on the one hand the Highland Clearances and related aspects of Scottish history and on the other migration studies in the British Empire. In each case, he has made contributions of such significance as to transform research in these fields. ...
E-ISBN-13: 9781784997090
E-ISBN-10: 1784997099
Page Count: 296
Publication Year: 2015
OCLC Number: 981573781
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