The impact of imperial power on the periphery and Britain

Key issue(s)
​​Orientalism, patterns of work, famine, technological progress, disease and medicine, national identities, religion, gender, education, erosion and preservation of local and ‘indigenous’ cultures, sport, law and order
Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism is a key idea, but this needs to reflect that Said later modified some of his earlier thoughts in response to the accusations of eurocentrism made against him.
  • Discuss cultural interactions and how knowledge was produced within the empire as part of this breadth topic. 
  • Discuss the ideological underpinnings of empire and how these were expressed and justified through notions of progress and pseudo science.​​​
Internet Resources

​Orientalism
  • A useful collection of resources critiquing Edward Said.
  • Antonio Gramsci explores coercion and consent (ie: not just economics in creating an imperial ‘hegemony’).
Internet Resources

The work of Frantz Fanon, about whom there are also some interesting YouTube films exploring his life and thought.
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Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd Edtn Zed Press, 2012).

For students with an interest in exploring this further, key texts might include: Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (Heinemann Educational, 1986), by Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.
One of the key challenges in this part of the study will be how to decolonise studies of empire: i.e. – how to ensure that alternative views and the views and experiences/understandings of the so-called ‘peripheries’ are properly represented and placed centrally (indeed, the notion of ‘the periphery’ also needs to be critiqued) and where this blends automatically into post-colonial theory.
Internet Resources

There is a lot of debate about the experience of famines in 19th century India and why the railway infrastructure could not avert them (see also Key Topic 1).

Primary accounts
Secondary materials that help to place these in context 
  • Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis (London: Verso, 2001).
  • ‘British colonial policy and famines: Some effects and implications of free trade’ in the Bombay, Bengal and Madras presidencies, 1860–1900’ (1991) by Kate Currie in South Asia, vol. 14, pp.23-56.

Google searches will also produce some - often very disturbing – photographic sources of these times.
For comparison, here's a study on famine in 19th century China. ​
Railway handcar
Castles on a railway handcar on the way to Naginimora, 1936.PP MS 19/6/NAGA/0615 (SOAS manuscript number). Photograph: Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. © Nicholas Haimendorf.
Internet Resources
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  • M I Finlay ‘Colonies: An Attempt at a Typology’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 26 (1976), pp. 167-188.
  • D. K. Fieldhouse,‘Imperialism’: An Historiographical Revision (1961), The Economic History Review, 14: 187–209.
  • Darwin etc. and Motyl Imperial Ends: The Decline, Collapse, and Revival of Empires (2001).
​In part, this section of the key topic also relates back to the earlier discussions of the nature of imperial rule (The governance and administration of the Empire), and the idea that ‘the metropole’ and ‘the periphery’ are not particularly helpful ways of understanding imperialism as a system of power – better to consider the complex networks and local relationships that develop over time and which are geographically and historically contingent.

Be careful not to overemphasise the economic flows as being determinants of empire.
The complex intersections between gender, race and class need to be discussed in this context – with some historians arguing that class was as significant as race in determining social status. However, it is also relevant in considering the interactions between colonising and colonised and the formation of ‘hybrid’ cultures – including the influence of the colonised upon the colonisers​. 

This is particularly significant in the context of settler societies and the development of ‘neo Europes’.
Internet Resources

Some primary materials for discussion. ​
Internet Resources

Technological advances during the Victoria period
Some interesting pocket sized introductions to key technological advances during the Victorian period: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/

An online exhibition at King’s College, University of London with some good basic notes and images:
‘Imperial designs: technology and empire in the 19th century’ 
 
Extensive primary materials:
http://www.victorianweb.org/technology/index.html