Showing posts with label Empire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Empire. Show all posts

Monday, 3 December 2012

Remembering Bristol’s Empire: Archives, Artefacts and Commemoration

Remembering Bristol’s Empire: Archives, Artefacts and Commemoration


Workshop - Thursday 13 December 2012

Senate Room, Senate House, Tyndall Avenue, University of Bristol

Prompted by the transfer of the collections of the former British Empire and Commonwealth Museum to Bristol Museums and Bristol Record Office, this workshop will offer an opportunity to discuss the collection, preservation and use of archives and artefacts from Bristol’s (and Britain’s) imperial past.

9am-11am – Roundtable – ‘Remembering Empire: Perspectives from Bristol Academics’

11am-11.30am – Coffee

11.30am-1pm – John McAleer (University of Southampton) and Sarah Longair (British Museum/Birkbeck) – ‘Objects of Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience’

1pm-2pm – Lunch

2pm-3pm – Katherine Prior – ‘Collecting Empire: Lessons from the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum’

3pm-4pm – Roundtable – Sue Giles (Bristol Museums), Richard Burley (Bristol Record Office), Tim Cole (History, UoB), Simon Potter (History, UoB)

4pm-5pm – Drinks, Student Common Room, 11 Woodland Road

There is no charge to register for this event, but please email Dr Simon Potter, University of Bristol if you wish to attend – simon.potter@bristol.ac.uk

This event has been funded by a grant from BIRTHA at the University of Bristol.

Friday, 23 November 2012

CFP: Connected Histories of Empire, 15-16 July 2013, Bristol

Call for Papers: Connected Histories of Empire, 15-16 July 2013, Bristol


Centre for the Study of Colonial & Postcolonial Societies, University of Bristol

Over the last two decades, scholars have begun to characterise the British Empire as a complex patchwork of interacting and dynamic agencies, rather than as a homogenous monolith. As a result, the traditional spatial framework based on a stable division between the metropole and the periphery seems increasingly outmoded. Instead, historians, literary critics, scholars of globalisation, and philosophers have been writing about the webs, networks, and circuits in which people, objects, and ideas moved. This conference will interrogate the idea of an empire of connections, considering the possibilities opened up by thinking in terms of global interaction, as well as the challenges of incorporating the myriad interconnections of empire into coherent historical narratives.

The conference is the culmination of a year of events at the University of Bristol which have focused particularly on the memorialisation and commemoration of the British Empire. As scholars have begun to uncover the intricately woven interconnections of empire, a central concern of the conference will be to consider how this might influence how empire has been, and is, remembered and memorialised in Britain and elsewhere.


The organisers would like to invite proposals for papers and panels that speak to the following broad themes:

  • The commemoration and memorialisation of different imperial sites, events and phenomena
  • Links between imperial port-cities/global cities
  • Flows of people, goods (physical and cultural), and cash
  • The movement, preservation and display of imperial artefacts and archives
  • Imperial networks and imperial careering
  • Imperial audiences and public spheres
  • The links between global history and imperial history
And would like to encourage broad discussion of connections and comparisons between different modern empires: proposals need not be restricted to the history of the British empire. Papers are welcomed from a range of academic disciplines.

To apply please send a 250 word abstract to the organisers at connectedhistoriesofempire@yahoo.co.uk  by 14 January 2013.

Conference organisers:

History: Ms Emily Baughan, Prof Robert Bickers, Prof Peter Coates, Prof Tim Cole, Dr Simon Potter, Dr Jonathan Saha, Dr Rob Skinner

Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies: Dr Matthew Brown, Dr Joanna Crow

English: Dr John Lee

Archaeology & Anthropology: Prof Mark Horton

Monday, 4 July 2011

CFP: Imperial Relations: Families in the British Empire Institute of Historical Research, London 5-6th September 2011

Imperial Relations: Families in the British Empire Institute of Historical Research, London 5-6th September 2011


Call for papers

In the past decade, historians have increasingly turned to the family as a key site of imperial processes. This conference aims to bring together local and international scholars working on any aspect of British imperial family history between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Across the British Empire, the family was a social and economic unit at the heart of life. It operated as a site of economic strategy and capital accumulation; shaped identity formation; and structured political, gendered, sexual, generational and racialised power relations. By exploring these themes, the conference aims to provoke a conversation about the multiple and complex ways in which the family operated as a critical building block that shaped, enabled, sustained and resisted colonialism in a range of geographic and temporal contexts, from British Columbia to British India.

In so doing, the conference aims to facilitate deeper connections and future collaborations between historians interested in different aspects of family history, from the family economies of colonial rule to the social histories of imperial education.

Key themes include, but are not limited to:
• Family intimacy at a distance
• Age and Generation
• Race, nation and ethnicity
• Affective economies
• Colonial Networks
• Sexuality

To submit a proposal please email an abstract of up to 300 words and a 1-page CV to Colonial.Families@gmail.com by Friday 22 July 2011. The numbers of papers that can be accepted is limited. Proposals from Postgraduates and Early Career Scholars are particularly welcome! If you are interested in attending and participating in the conference, registration details will be available on our website later in July.

This conference is organised by Esmé Cleall, Laura Ishiguro and Emily Manktelow on behalf of the Family & Colonialism research network. For more information, please see: http://colonialfamilies.wordpress.com/

Tuesday, 18 January 2011

Imperial and World History seminar series

Imperial and World History seminars


University of London

Convenors: Frank Bongiorno (KCL), Richard Drayton (KCL), Philip Murphy (ICS), Sarah Stockwell (KCL), John Stuart (Kingston), David Todd (KCL), Jon Wilson (KCL)

Germany Room, IHR, Mondays at 5.00pm, fortnightly
Winter/Spring Term, 2010

This academic year our seminars will loosely be focussed on the theme of global intellectual history, some examining the transnational history of ideas and others the interactions of ideas and imperial power.

January 17

John Stuart (Kingston), Informal Empire, Religious Liberty, Human Rights?: Egypt, 1919-48

January 31

Leslie James (LSE), George Padmore and the African anti-colonial struggle, c. 1950-56

February 28

David Scott (Columbia), Ethnography as Intellectual History: The Small Axe project and the recovery of Caribbean thought

March 14

David Armitage (Harvard), The International Turn in Intellectual History

March 21

Maurizio Isabella (QMUL), Italian debates on Empire in the Mediterranean during the
Risorgimento

Tea is available in the IHR before the seminar

The Summer term will include Frank Bongiorno (KCL) valedictory seminar on Sex in Australia, Dan Matlin (QMUL) on African-American nationalists ideas about Africa, and a roundtable on Lauren Benton (NYU)'s A Search for Sovereignty including Quentin Skinner (QMUL)

Our theme for the 2011-12 academic year will be Violence.

Tuesday, 24 August 2010

Commodities of Empire

The Commodities of Empire Project is an official British Academy Research Project, Commodities of Empire is a collaboration between the Open University's Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies and the University of London School of Advanced Study's Institute for the Study of the Americas.

The project recognises the links between imperial expansion, global trade and the ongoing industrial revolution, and explores the networks through which commodities including included foodstuffs (wheat, rice, bananas); industrial crops (cotton, rubber, linseed and palm oils); stimulants (sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and opium); and ores (tin, copper, gold, diamonds) circulated within, and in the spaces between, empires.

A special 'Commodities of Empire' issue in the Journal of Global History was published in Spring 2009 (Vol 4, No.1). The project website also contains a series of online working papers.

These have been published since 2007 and topics include sugar, engineering and commerce in nineteenth-century Cuba; tobacco in the Dominican Republic; the role of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic coal route; the United Kingdom and the political economy of the global oil-producing nuts and seeds during the 1930s;

the history of Bengali raw silk; obscenity, empire and global networks; coffee and decolonisation in Kenya; tapioca-cassava; cotton, imperialism and public-private development in Britain’s African colonies, 1900-1918; the Kongo rubber trade; Indian Pale Ale; the battle for rubber in the Second World War; and Cuban popular resistance to the 1953 London Sugar Agreement.