This chapter focuses on the multiple mobilities of prisoners of war captured by the British in the years 1793–1815. It refers to prisoners being held at contested imperial sites across a vast panorama of warfare, from the Cape of Good Hope to Jamaica, Ceylon, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, alongside detention centers, including prisons, prison ships, and parole towns in Britain. A combined analysis of these sites makes visible the scope and scale of war captivity and prisoner movements across the British imperial world. The chapter investigates how British administrators coped with influxes of prisoners, asks questions about legal status, subjecthood, and liberty during this revolutionary period, and argues for the inclusion of the experiences of non-combatants and civilians – groups ranging from whalers and free and enslaved people of color, to lascar seamen, independent travelers, women, and children – within theaters of war and histories of forced migration more broadly.

This book begins with a family that does not fit. Pollie Keen was born to a Buckinghamshire washerwoman. She spent her teenage years as a servant, married a farm laborer-turned-soldier, and lived out her late twenties as a lady of leisure, flitting between tea parties, carriage rides, and dances that lasted into the early hours of the morning. In 1889, Pollie, her three children, and her husband Dick, by then a sergeant with the Royal Horse Artillery, went to India. It was once the family had settled in Sialkot in Punjab that Pollie’s social status and material world changed so dramatically. Dick wrote to his brother that the family was enjoying the “fine country” and enumerated the servants at their disposal. “I am same [sic] like gentleman. We are both in bed when the cook comes in to light the fire, lay the breakfast and all ready before we get up, and the barber taps at the door to shave me and man is waiting to clean the boots and clothes for all of us.”1 Having fires laid, shoes polished, breakfast made, and a barber at the ready were luxuries Dick and Pollie could never reasonably have hoped for in Britain. Pollie bragged to her mother that, after a lifetime of domestic labor, her only duties were dusting and changing the bed linens.2

Ireland’s history within the United Kingdom is, not to put too fine a point upon it, complicated. The question of the shared constitutional history of Ireland and Great Britain is more complicated again by the uncodified nature of the constitution of the United Kingdom. This chapter explores the constitutional links between Ireland and the United Kingdom after 1800. It does so by examining both the experience of constitutionalism in Ireland, and the manner in which this experience was understood and how it influenced constitutional development in the United Kingdom.

Studying the history of animals in colonial Myanmar is a project that reveals new understandings of the impact of British imperialism, necessitating historians to attend to both the material and cultural transformations in the colony. However, studying animals and colonized people throws up two challenges to the historian. First, how can we recover the historical experiences of both within the same analytical frame. Second, how can postcolonial and post-humanist animal studies be integrated. This introduction offers an approach to studying interspecies relations as way of addressing these issues.

This chapter begins by contextualizing Cassius Dio’s Roman History in the political and literary culture of Severan Rome. From there, it introduces the major themes of this volume, namely the idea of Roman political culture under the Principate, Cassius Dio’s understanding of this culture, and the reception of Dio’s construction of Roman imperial culture after antiquity.

The notion of the ‘tribe’ is perhaps the most (ab)used socio-political category when it comes to contemporary political discourse on Afghanistan. Following on from the alternate construction of Afghanistan as a failed state, as a frontier and from debates about ‘Af-Pak’, Chapter 3 shows the ways in which a particular lens through which the early East India Company administrators tried to comprehend the people they encountered has become a definitive marker of Afghan society, polity and culture today. The discussion traces the genealogy of the term ‘tribe’ before moving on to an examination of the problematic knowledge practices that underpin this over-determined and misleading Afghan ‘way of life’.