In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, members of an established, English-speaking middle class built a new category of work for themselves. This book uses US, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand occupation statistics, archives, professional journals, and newspapers to understand what the history of nursing, accountancy, teaching, medicine, law, engineering, journalism, and social work can tell us about class in the ‘long twentieth century’. This chapter gives a historical and theoretical introduction to the rise of the professional class as a distinctly transnational event. The Anglo world is not a matter of comparative ‘case studies’, but a network of English-speaking communities that were regionally distinctive but operated as part of a shared cultural and economic world. It was a world built on Indigenous dispossession. Settlers brought their moral frameworks to bear on the ‘civilizing’ that they believed they needed. The virtues that they built into each profession, such as duty, probity, and charity, were performed as real, embodied work in every settlement. Their morality was made material and invested for social and economic profit. They became virtue capitalists.

This chapter discusses sub-Saharan Africa’s history with rock and metal, where Africa’s scenes are found today, and how those two genres have rooted themselves into the world’s ‘final frontier’ – whether it was during a difficult period of authoritarianism or through the organic passion of fans who found a genre that best represented their interest. As Africa’s various rock and metal scenes have unfolded during different periods in different countries under different circumstances, and continue to meet various challenges such as continued political strife, economic disparities and poorly developed infrastructures, this chapter also highlights what African metal bands sound like, the languages used in metal performances in Africa, and what if any local sounds and instrumentation acts are infusing (or, are they paying homage to their Western heroes?). Though the genres’ introduction into the African continent has met various difficulties, and continues to do so, African heavy metal stories tell of music that is empowering performers and excited fans alike.

This chapter examines the sociopolitical history of the ‘euharmonic organ’, built by Henry Liston in 1817 for St Andrew’s, the first Presbyterian Church in India. Liston’s unique organ was adapted for performance of church music and common-practice repertory in a ‘natural tuning’, optimizing perfect consonance over practicality. Drawing on the arguments of political historian Timothy Mitchell, I argue that this unusual design feature was intended to afford sensations of musical space and time as organized in accordance with the topological and chronological propositions of colonial modernity. The first section investigates how the instrument’s purchase, contrary to the church’s prior rejection of organ music, altered how it construed the relation between reason and sensation, and why those changes were tolerated as necessary for establishing the Anglo-Indian Presbytery as equally progressive and modern to the Anglican Church of India. The second section draws on Liston’s musical historiography in addressing how the instrument was also envisioned as consistent with the church’s programs for ‘native education’. In an afterword, I reflect on the instability of the church’s musicological claims, by showing how Indian theorists successfully inverted what natural tuning represented in order to support claims that musical modernity originated in Hindustan, not Europe.

In his path-breaking 1954 monograph, Nations nègres et culture, the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop denounced Western histories for providing false justification for European imperialism and perpetuating notions of the inferiority of Black peoples. Diop called instead for histories that revalorized the African past and demonstrated Black contributions to world history. By contextualizing Diop’s historiographical interventions in terms of his anticolonial politics and the work of other anticolonial and anti-racist thinkers, this chapter shows how, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, the terrain of history was a key battleground of anti-racist and anticolonial activism. The multiple sites in which anticolonial and anti-racist histories were developed – from museums like the Musée de l’Homme through journals such as Présence Africaine, and organizational initiatives funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiatives – are central to this story.

This essay tracks the conflicts that have taken place in Ireland over a period of several centuries, examining the ways in which Shakespeare has, himself, engaged with these conflicts, and the ways in which his work has been recruited by those participating in the conflicts – on both sides. The importance of Shakespeare to the identity formation of the colonial community in Ireland is noted, and the increasing appropriation of Shakespeare by nationalists from the end of the eighteenth century onwards is registered. A particular point of focus here is the nineteenth-century nationalist militant and land-rights activist Michael Davitt. Davitt’s possession of several photographic images relating to Shakespeare is noted, as is his general acquaintance with the playwright’s work. The essay also discusses the importance of Shakespeare to later nationalists, such as Patrick Pearse, executed for leading the 1916 uprising against British rule in Ireland. That one contemporary unionist commentator unexpectedly offered a cautious celebration of Pearse’s self-sacrifice by drawing a comparison between the militant and Julius Caesar’s Brutus is a telling sign of the extent to which Shakespeare served as a kind of common cultural reference point over the course of Ireland’s fraught, conflictual history.

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.

European imperialism in Pacific Asia not only displaced China as the center of its neighbors’ attention but it splintered the region as well. This was sharp connectivity. France established French Indochina, the Dutch tightened their control of Indonesia, the British took over Malaya and Burma, and all of them had pieces of a disintegrating China. Japan avoided colonization and created its own empire, beginning with Korea and Taiwan. China became the vulnerable edge of a global frame, a frame centered on Europe that included the pieces of Pacific Asia. China’s population was now seen as an impediment to modernization, and its artisanal production was swamped by Western mass production. The US replaced European segmented globalization with a hub-and-spoke globalism rimmed by newly sovereign states. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China remained a mostly insignificant other to its neighbors until Deng Xiaoping’s policies took hold. The salience of China’s presence, population, and production began to rise, and China had become a significant other to its region by 1998. But the US remained the center of an unquestioned global order until the financial crisis of 2008.

The gold rush in the 1890s and the discovery of oil in 1920 prompted the Canadian government to negotiate treaties 8 and 11 with the Dene and Gwich’in. With the arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, these treaties formalized colonial control over the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Medicine, hospitals, and healthcare were promised as part of treaty negotiations, but the infrastructure of care erected in this period was underfunded and racially contingent, prioritizing settlers and sojourners. Sanitary infrastructure appeared as a necessary response to the surge of newcomers in search of gold in the Yukon. Otherwise, healthcare for Indigenous northerners was designed around the objectives of the Christian missions upon whom the government depended to deliver its treaty promises.

This chapter discusses how the English nation was imagined in new ways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that the idea of a distinct English self was increasingly articulated in the context of imperial and mercantile ambitions and and ventures. These ventures helped consolidate the idea that the English were better than foreign peoples, as well as superior to their rivals such as the Spanish or the Dutch. The English both defined themselves in opposition to those they sought to colonise or trade with or to their imperial rivals and also borrowed from them. Imperial nationalism deeply reshaped ideas about proper gender roles, coupledom and marriage, procreation and child-rearing and racial and religious identities. To illustrate this, the chapter discusses the writings of Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and other writers of the period.

For many scholars of the African diaspora, the genre of travel writing represents a worldview largely informed by Western conquest and colonization. American writer James Baldwin’s encounters with West Africans and North Africans – described in essays he wrote between 1950 and 1972 – questions a longstanding presumption: that African American expatriate writers transcended the limits of travel-writing in order to stand in opposition to colonialist concepts of modernity. This chapter argues that Baldwin’s travel essays implicate dislocated subjects in complex networks of power, at times reasserting Europe’s colonial and racial logics and at times challenging them.

This chapter focuses on the pairing of popular fiction and imperialism. It takes as a starting point the historical coincidence of the rise of new forms of popular fiction with the intensification of colonialism in Britain during the New Imperialism (roughly from the 1870s to 1914). Examining titles including H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and numerous others, the discussion treats Victorian popular fiction as both a site where colonialist ideology exerts its power and a site where ambivalences, vagaries and paradoxes speak of a struggle to make sense of imperial rationales. Examining how popular fiction represents history and the individual, landscape and temporality, threat and assimilation and the supposed adaptability of Englishness reveals some of the rhetorical and ideological contortions that rendered British imperialism thinkable to its own prosecutors.

This chapter introduces the region, peoples, and historical changes underway in the mid-nineteenth century where the book begins. The lands lie along the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers and their tributaries, where waters flow north along the Mackenzie River into the Beaufort Sea and south-west down the Yukon River across into Alaska. These are the homelands of Inuvialuit, Gwich’in, Tłı̨chǫ, Dene, Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, Tagish, Tutchone, Dënesųłıné, and Métis. This chapter introduces these peoples as well as the earliest Euro-Canadian colonizers and settlers: fur traders, explorers, missionaries, police, state officials, and their families who arrived in the nineteenth century and describes the book’s objectives: to learn about the historical significance of major northern epidemics before 1940 from those who survived; to use ecological approaches to disease to understand how colonialism shaped northern health; and to demonstrate the influence of flaws ideas about isolation and vulnerability in shaping past interpretations of the role of disease in the process of colonization.

The book ends in 1940, on the cusp of change that came with the militarization of the North during the Second World War and the Cold War. This was also when the Canadian government asserted greater control over the North, including over healthcare. Epidemics that arrived with resource workers, military, and state personnel, were interpreted by southern observers as ‘virgin soil epidemics’ in ‘isolated’ populations. These epidemics and their northern setting influenced biomedical research into the nature of immunity that was significant to the history of medicine.

A world-changing influenza came to the Mackenzie River in 1928, killing up to 10 per cent of the population in less than two months. A century later, stories about 1928 continue to be shared in the North and are combined here with archival materials that detail state, medical, and community responses. This chapter tells the story of the 1928 epidemic in depth. The narrative follows the spread of the influenza virus aboard the main trade post supply ship, the SS Distributor, and then out on the land through treaty gatherings and the normal social life of summer, all irrevocably disrupted.