Author: Great Britain. Foreign OfficePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 1440
Book Description
British Subjects
Author: Fred D'AguiarPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 70
Book Description
Home is 'always elsewhere' for Fred D'Aguiar: born in Britain, brought up in Guyana, and now living in London and America. In his previous two books, Mama Dot and Airy Hall, he caught up with his past by writing about his upbringing in Guyana. Now his focus is Britain: being and feeling British, feeling at home but not being made to feel at home. Confronted by the Customs men at Heathrow, his passport stamp 'British Citizen not bold enough for my liking and too much for theirs'.Fred D'Aguiar maps out new poetic territory in British Subjects, re-discovering a sense of belonging in poems charting landmarks in his life: the return to Guyana with exiled writer Wilson Harris; finding the grave of an unknown African slave in Bristol; an unsettling visit to Germany; living by the Thames at Greenwich, and then by the sea at Whitley Bay. Always searching, always on edge, D'Aguiar can only lose himself when all the barriers come down, as in poems celebrating love, the body, and the fusing spirit of Notting Hill Carnival. Behind all these poems is his personal talisman, the River Thames, the Sweet Thames of his recent film, a great watery snake entering his dreams like a fertility god, transplanted from Britain to the rainforest of Guyana.
Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660-1750
Author: Catherine IngrassiaPublisher:
ISBN: 9780813948089
Category : Authority in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, captivity emerged as a persistent metaphor as well as a material reality. The exercise of power on both an institutional and a personal level created conditions in which those least empowered, particularly women, perceived themselves to be captive subjects. This "domestic captivity" was inextricably connected to England's systematic enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the wealth accumulation realized from those actions, even as early fictional narratives suppressed or ignored the experience of the enslaved. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660-1750 explores how captivity informed identity, actions, and human relationships for white British subjects as represented in fictional texts by British authors from the period. This work complicates interpretations of canonical authors such as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood and asserts the importance of authors such as Penelope Aubin and Edward Kimber. Drawing on the popular press, unpublished personal correspondence, and archival documents, Catherine Ingrassia provides a rich cultural description that situates literary texts from a range of genres within the material world of captivity. Ultimately, the book calls for a reevaluation of how literary texts that code a heretofore undiscussed connection to the slave trade or other types of captivity are understood.
Whitewashing Britain
Author: Kathleen PaulPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729330
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
Kathleen Paul challenges the usual explanation for the racism of post-war British policy. According to standard historiography, British public opinion forced the Conservative government to introduce legislation stemming the flow of dark-skinned immigrants and thereby altering an expansive nationality policy that had previously allowed all British subjects free entry into the United Kingdom. Paul's extensive archival research shows, however, that the racism of ministers and senior functionaries led rather than followed public opinion. In the late 1940s, the Labour government faced a birthrate perceived to be in decline, massive economic dislocations caused by the war, a huge national debt, severe labor shortages, and the prospective loss of international preeminence. Simultaneously, it subsidized the emigration of Britons to Australia, Canada, and other parts of the Empire, recruited Irish citizens and European refugees to work in Britain, and used regulatory changes to dissuade British subjects of color from coming to the United Kingdom. Paul contends post-war concepts of citizenship were based on a contradiction between the formal definition of who had the right to enter Britain and the informal notion of who was, or could become, really British. Whitewashing Britain extends this analysis to contemporary issues, such as the fierce engagement in the Falklands War and the curtailment of citizenship options for residents of Hong Kong. Paul finds the politics of citizenship in contemporary Britain still haunted by a mixture of imperial, economic, and demographic imperatives.
The Imperial Nation
Author: Josep M. FraderaPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691167451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414
Book Description
How the legacy of monarchical empires shaped Britain, France, Spain, and the United States as they became liberal entities Historians view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a turning point when imperial monarchies collapsed and modern nations emerged. Treating this pivotal moment as a bridge rather than a break, The Imperial Nation offers a sweeping examination of four of these modern powers—Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States—and asks how, after the great revolutionary cycle in Europe and America, the history of monarchical empires shaped these new nations. Josep Fradera explores this transition, paying particular attention to the relations between imperial centers and their sovereign territories and the constant and changing distinctions placed between citizens and subjects. Fradera argues that the essential struggle that lasted from the Seven Years’ War to the twentieth century was over the governance of dispersed and varied peoples: each empire tried to ensure domination through subordinate representation or by denying any representation at all. The most common approach echoed Napoleon’s “special laws,” which allowed France to reinstate slavery in its Caribbean possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese constitutions adopted “specialness” in the 1830s; the United States used comparable guidelines to distinguish between states, territories, and Indian reservations; and the British similarly ruled their dominions and colonies. In all these empires, the mix of indigenous peoples, European-origin populations, slaves and indentured workers, immigrants, and unassimilated social groups led to unequal and hierarchical political relations. Fradera considers not only political and constitutional transformations but also their social underpinnings. Presenting a fresh perspective on the ways in which nations descended and evolved from and throughout empires, The Imperial Nation highlights the ramifications of this entangled history for the subjects who lived in its shadows.
State and Citizen
Author: Peter ThompsonPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813933501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Book Description
Pointing the way to a new history of the transformation of British subjects into American citizens, State and Citizen challenges the presumption that the early American state was weak by exploring the changing legal and political meaning of citizenship. The volume’s distinguished contributors cast new light on the shift from subjecthood to citizenship during the American Revolution by showing that the federal state played a much greater part than is commonly supposed. Going beyond master narratives—celebratory or revisionist—that center on founding principles, the contributors argue that geopolitical realities and the federal state were at the center of early American political development. The volume’s editors, Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf, bring together political science and historical methodologies to demonstrate that citizenship was a political as well as a legal concept. The American state, this collection argues, was formed and evolved in a more dialectical relationship between citizens and government authority than is generally acknowledged. Suggesting points of comparison between an American narrative of state development—previously thought to be exceptional—and those of Europe and Latin America, the contributors break fresh ground by investigating citizenship in its historical context rather than by reference only to its capacity to confer privileges.
Subjects, Citizens, and Others
Author: Benno GammerlPublisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800732139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Bosnian Muslims, East African Masai, Czech-speaking Austrians, North American indigenous peoples, and Jewish immigrants from across Europe—the nineteenth-century British and Habsburg Empires were characterized by incredible cultural and racial-ethnic diversity. Notwithstanding their many differences, both empires faced similar administrative questions as a result: Who was excluded or admitted? What advantages were granted to which groups? And how could diversity be reconciled with demands for national autonomy and democratic participation? In this pioneering study, Benno Gammerl compares Habsburg and British approaches to governing their diverse populations, analyzing imperial formations to reveal the legal and political conditions that fostered heterogeneity.
British and Foreign State Papers
Author: Great Britain. Foreign OfficePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 1440
Book Description
The Punjab Record
Author: Defending the indefensible
Author: Great Britain: Parliamentary and Health Service OmbudsmanPublisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780102974997
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 108
Book Description
This report concerns a complaint by Mr A (now deceased) and his siblings, who were British civilians interned by the Japanese in Singapore in 1945. In 2000 they applied to the compensation scheme set up by the British Government to recognise the 'debt of honour' owed by the UK to British prisoners of war and civilian internees. They were initially denied compensation because they did not have a close enough link to the UK to qualify, but received a £500 payment and an apology following the Ombudsman's intervention. In 2007, the MoD set up a further scheme to compensate those whose applications to the original scheme were wrongly rejected. Mr A's family was invited to apply to this second scheme, but their application was refused and they were told that the previous apology and payment had been given to them in error. The investigation found that Mr A and his siblings were subjected to prolonged and aggravated distress by the British Government during the 10 years that they struggled to resolve their compensation claims with the MoD. The MoD mismanaged the administration of the second compensation scheme and had incorrectly and offensively retracted a previous apology issued to them. The Secretary of State for Defence should apologise personally to the family and pay them the compensation wrongly denied to them (£4,000 each) plus a further £5,000 each in recognition of the distress they suffered. The MoD has accepted all the recommendations and will launch its own review of what went wrong
Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States
Author: United States. Department of StatePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 1260
Book Description