A few months ago, the Snapshots team attended a one-day workshop on “islands in history” at the University of Leicester. The range of viewpoints and methodologies on display was slightly dizzying, but we came away with some fairy niggling questions:…
Yearly Archives: 2016
Civilizing Empire?: Race, criminal justice, and how the Colonial Office reconciled the violence of colonial government
Previous blogs have touched upon the ways in which the Imperial government in London tied together geographically and governmentally disparate colonies into a relatively cohesive entity known as the British Empire. We have likewise discussed some of the activities of…
Fantasies of the Past, Fantasies of the Future: George Birdwood, Clements Markham, and how the shape of your archive determines the reach of your power
One of the things we’re trying to get a sense of in this project is governmentality as something ‘more-than-human’; a close-grained understanding of how power moves, and the colonial state constitutes itself, through the networks, technologies and instruments of imperial…
Interdisciplinarity and Cooperative Research: Reflections on a Workshop
On the 2 September, 2016, ‘Snapshots of Empire’ hosted its first workshop. Thirty delegates gathered to discuss themes connected directly to imperial governmentality, including: imperial administration and governance, the infrastructures of communication and connection across empires, relationships between bureaucracies in…
Posted in Historiography, Public Engagement
1857 on the Peripheries of Empire
During our recent workshop, Daniel Clayton emphasised the importance of reflecting on where meaning congeals when investigating the impact of events and ideas across an empire. This approach is no more important than when considering the impact of the Indian…
Snapshots of Empire September Workshop – audio recording
We here at Snapshots of Empire are glad to report that our workshop on September 2nd went swimmingly: thanks to all our participants, both on the panel and not, we ended the day inspired, fired up, and alive with new ideas…
Posted in Public Engagement
Mobilising an Empire: Part 2 – “Not Calculated to Attract Any Particular Attention,” Or, How to Smuggle an Army Through Someone Else’s Country Without Anyone Making a Fuss
In 1857, as the Indian Uprising threatened the stability and integrity of the British Empire, the British Government and the East India Company engaged in a massive smuggling operation. The cargo was people: armed men, shuttled en masse and in disguise,…
Mobilising an Empire: Part 1 – Sir George Grey and the Tale of the Self-Sacrificing Cape Colony
In our last couple of blogs, we have proposed the merits of viewing the violence of 1857 as a global event: one which necessitated the mobilisation of a global network of communications, technology, people, and power, and made use of…
“You should try having an email inbox”: 1857, power/knowledge and the imperial state
A couple of weeks ago the Snapshots of Empire team were very kindly invited to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to take part in a panel discussion as part of a History Week the FCO were running for their staff.…
Posted in Communication, Public Engagement
1857: Managing imperial crisis
In our last blog, we looked at some of the ways in which the events of 1857 played out in one nodal point of the network of empire: how colonial administrators, as they went about the business of moving goods,…
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