This contribution details an early chapter in the long and complex history of the relationship of international socialism with anticolonial movements in British India. It tells a story of global intellectual interaction that informed and shaped international socialism as well as transnational anticolonialism between 1918 and 1924. It does so by highlighting a few aspects of this history. First, it discusses why radical anticolonialists gravitated towards international communism in the wake of the First World War. Second, it shows how the intersection between Marxist theory and anticolonial thought resulted in a capacious understanding of imperialism as a mode of capitalist production and organization of resources. Third, it illustrates how in interactions with radical anticolonialists from colonies like India, communists across the industrial world came to recognize national revolutionary movements as an integral part of the imminent world international revolution. Finally, it reveals the British colonial state’s anxiety about the rise of subversive ideas in the interwar years and its beleaguered response to this type of transnational anticolonialism.

Tracking rural South Asians from their lives as peasant farmers to their roles as lascar seamen, waged labourers and petty traders, Chapter 3 examines their remarkable working lives. It situates their experience of waged labour within that of other non-white immigrants, as well as that of the (mostly white) native working class. It proposes that current understanding incorrectly concludes that the fluidity of South Asian men’s working lives was a response to structural discrimination in the British labour market. In contrast, it asserts that many maintained their own agenda for economic independence. The chapter contends that South Asians often self-financed their migration to take up self-employment as pedlars in Britain, rather than simply being lascar seafarers jumping ship. This undermines claims that peddling was an imposed form of precarity. As fare-paying passengers, the growing number of pedlars during the 1930s resembles the economic migration of the post-Partition era. Thus the forms and networks of immigration were created prior to, and were bolstered by, the Second World War, rather than being solely a product of the post-war era.

This essay focuses on a programme of a Shakespearean revue entitled ‘This Sceptred Isle’ (1941) in the possession of the Wolfson Centre for Archival Research, Library of Birmingham. Billed as a ‘Dramatisation of Shakespeare’s Call to Great Britain in Time of War’, the show was a brainchild of eminent Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) and featured such warlike set pieces as ‘This England never did, nor never shall, / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror’ (King John) and John of Gaunt’s ‘this sceptred isle’ oration (Richard II). Knight performed all the main roles. He was convinced of Britain’s imperial destiny and of the central importance of Shakespeare (‘a national prophet’) in it. Indeed, Knight’s interpretation of the playwright informed his wartime assertion about Britain’s imperial mission and the significance of the monarchy. ‘This Sceptred Isle’ was, however, hardly a typical piece of British wartime propaganda, considering that its creator was an admirer of Nietzsche, whose ideas were appropriated by Nazism. This essay aims to explore Knight’s idiosyncratic thinking underlying the programme of ‘This Sceptred Isle’ in order to clarify how the admirer of Nietzsche and Nazism created a polemics of British patriotism with recourse to Shakespeare.

The British constitution has always been an imperial constitution. To deny this is a common, if mistaken, position in the civil war over its true nature. The institutional structure and ideological discourse of the British constitution always extended beyond the pale of England and the English people. For nearly a millennium the British imperial constitution has expanded and contracted across the globe to govern millions of disparate peoples as subjects of a common Crown. The Norman reconstitution of the English nation began by fusing the multiplicity of local laws into a single common law for English people. Over the seventeenth century the rise, demise and then compromise of the Crown against Parliament was played out in a long civil war fought across the Atlantic and fuelled by novel political arguments drawing on new colonial knowledge about Indigenous peoples. A second civil war in the following century saw most American colonists break free from the imperial constitution, which was then reconstituted to satisfy some remaining subjects and to suppress others. In the nineteenth century a third civil war of sorts erupted across the empire as Hindu and Muslim, Métis and Māori, and Black men and women from Jamaica to the Gold Coast rose up in armed resistance to British imperial governance. Each rebellion drew on a global discourse on the British imperial constitution that justified or rejected competing political visions of collective life.

The British constitution’s global historical resonance is in no small part due to the extent and might of the British Empire, which touched the lives of more of humanity than any other in history. The imperial factor compelled the wide international importance of the British constitution and its history, which would otherwise be disproportionate to the clouded hills of an archipelago in the north Atlantic. In fact, Britain’s constitution, history, law and politics were analysed by all manner of people abroad in far greater numbers than those at ‘home’. Different lessons were learned. Gandhi, for example, who was admitted to London’s Inner Temple in 1888, in his early political career, looked back at Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation as ‘the Magna Charta of the Indians’1 and, till the end of his life, retained a certain ‘romantic veneration’ towards the British constitution and what it might do for India.2 On the other hand, his close follower Subhas Chandra Bose, who had also spent time in Britain as a student, in his 1938 presidential address to the Indian National Congress, warned, as in Ireland and Palestine, that ‘British ingenuity’ would ‘ruthlessly’ find a ‘constitutional device’, which he foretold would lead to the partitioning of India, ‘thereby neutralising the transference of power to the Indian people’.3 These two divergent reactions give some sense of the diversity of ideas the British constitution and history generated even among two familiar colleagues in the same country, both wanting freedom.

The English have found it difficult for most of their history to separate themselves from a British identity. That is in good part because they created two empires: the empire of the United Kingdom and the more familiar overseas British Empire. As an imperial people, they have merged their identities in their creations. But with the loss of the overseas empire and the possible break-up of the United Kingdom itself, they have been forced to consider the question of who they are and what is a specifically English as opposed to a British identity. Brexit has made that task even more urgent. The problem is the relative lack of a tradition of reflection on English national identity. There is no lack of cultural resources to draw on, but the work remains to be done.

The North Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century was an oceanic borderland zone shaped by whaling and other extractive industries, and characterised by the rapid circulation of animals, people, commodities and capital. It was also a thoroughly imperial space: while Japanese, Pacific Islanders and white ‘beachcombers’ all worked aboard whalers, only the latter could leverage their citizenship to secure extraterritorial protection from imperial powers.

The history of the Bonin (J: Ogasawara) Islands illustrates this well. Until 1830 the islands had only the most fleeting history of human habitation, yet by 1863 they had emerged as a vital provisioning hub for the whaling fleet, populated by Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Anglo beachcombers. When the Tokugawa government began colonising the islands, the beachcombers pointedly refused to naturalise as Japanese citizens, and secured diplomatic backing from their respective consulates in Tokyo. In doing so they frustrated Japanese attempts to assert territorial sovereignty over the Bonins for a generation.

In the summer of 1902 two ships raced from opposite sides of the Pacific toward a reef-ringed atoll covered only in birds and birdshit. The rock was named Marcus Island (J: Minami-torishima), and despite its minuscule size it now threatened to provoke a diplomatic confrontation between the United States and Japan, two empires that in the previous years had expanded across the Pacific towards each other with startling rapidity. This chapter explores how booming demand for commodities such as plumage and guano fertiliser encouraged prospectors to stake claims to uninhabited or marginally inhabited bird islands. To do so they deployed the rhetoric of colonial boosterism, exploiting ambient cultures of imperialism to persuade their governments to assert territorial sovereignty over them. Yet international law was vague as to what constituted legitimate occupation of ‘uninhabited’ territory, setting the stage for confrontations over atolls such as Marcus in 1902.

The East India Company is remembered as the world’s most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s, it was also the world’s most enlightened one. As Joshua Ehrlich reveals in this original account, a commitment to the cause of knowledge was integral to the Company’s ideology. Ehrlich shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company’s officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company—just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today’s politics.

Economic nationalism became a dominant, and often destructive, discourse in the interwar period. This manifested itself in the rise of economic antisemitism in Nazi Germany, as well as in the corporatist dictatorships ruling Italy, Romania and Brazil. These autocracies were promoted in the writings of Mihail Manoilescu, who believed that dictatorship could spur growth even in autarky. In other ways, however, the interwar period saw a sharpening of existing nineteenth-century trends. Anti-imperialist movements remained powerful, especially in China, where Sun Yat-sen conceived of a powerful protector state that would manage foreign investment. Multi-ethnic contexts, as in Mandatory Palestine, encouraged isolationist approaches, this time from Zionist nation-builders. These efforts at nation-building encouraged economic segregation and ultimately inter-communal conflict. Even Britain, the erstwhile beacon of free trade, attempted to transform its Empire into a self-sufficient trading block during the Great Depression.

Recent scholarly interest in the figure of the interpreter has resulted in a wealth of studies of individual interpreting careers and interpretation practices in specific historical contexts.  But, while it is common for present-day knowledge and personal experience of interpreting to inform historical case studies, or for historical examples to receive passing mention in accounts of the contemporary situation, a truly critically informed diachronic perspective is so far lacking.  This chapter takes a comparative diachronic approach to the study of interpreting by comparing and contrasting the lives of military interpreters in diverse historic contexts. Rather than offering separate biographies, my aim is to show how structural factors affect the position and practices of interpreters across time and space.  I will also show how experience in working with fragmentary evidence from one period (e.g., documents from the ancient Mediterranean world) can be used to inform research on interpreting in other historic contexts (e.g., British Army records from the First World War).

Often depicted by historians as a ‘forgotten’ war in the United States and unwanted distraction for Britain and its empire (with the exception of Canada), the Anglo-American War of 1812 for contemporaries was a conflict with high states. For the divided United States, the war was fought for a myriad of reasons, including outrage over British impressment of American sailors and infringements free trade, fear of American Indians, and a desire to re-assert American independence and lay claim to the position of pre-eminent power in North America. While victory offered tangible and moral prizes, defeat risked the shattering of the already-frail political unity of the young republic and relegation to secondary status in North America. For the British Empire, the war meant conflict with its primary overseas trading partner, which risked economic ruin for its manufacturing and shipping industries and resulted in severe opposition in some parts of the country. Victory, however, presented the tantalizing opportunity to avenge the embarrassment of the American Revolution and reaffix the young republic to the British sphere of influence. While the conflict itself resulted in few casualties and a treaty that recognized no victor, it ultimately shaped the future of North America and the direction of the British Empire.