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Y320: From Colonialism to Independence: The British Empire 1857–1965

The impact of imperial power on the periphery and Britain: Orientalism and the effects of rule on the colonies

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Overview

Recall questions on Said’s Orientalism, colonial labour, Indian famines, technology and modernisation, medicine, national identities, missions, gender, education, indigenous culture, sport and colonial law and order.

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Numbers

Assess the record of imperial medicine.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    What did Edward Said mean by Orientalism, and how have historians criticised it?

    Model answer

    Said argued in 1978 that European scholarship, travel writing and art constructed the East as an unchanging, sensual and irrational other whose supposed backwardness justified rule, so that knowledge and power reinforced one another; John MacKenzie and others replied that Western engagement with Asian art and religion was often admiring and transformative rather than simply denigrating, and that Said's model leaves colonised people no agency.

  2. 2

    Explain how imperial rule changed patterns of work in the colonies.

    Model answer

    Subsistence farming gave way to export crops such as cotton, cocoa, tea and rubber, mines and plantations demanded large migrant workforces, hut and poll taxes were levied specifically to force men into wage labour, pass laws such as the Kenyan kipande of 1920 controlled their movement, and after slavery was abolished more than a million indentured Indians were shipped to Mauritius, Natal, Fiji and the Caribbean.

  3. 3

    How have historians explained the famines of British India?

    Model answer

    The famine of 1876 to 1878 killed several million and further famines followed in 1896 and 1899; contemporaries blamed drought, but critics from Naoroji onwards blamed export of grain, revenue demands and Lytton's insistence on minimal relief, Mike Davis has argued that market ideology turned drought into mass death, and Amartya Sen's work on entitlements showed that famine can occur without any fall in the food supply, as in Bengal in 1943.

  4. 4

    Assess the argument that Britain modernised India through technology.

    Model answer

    India gained the largest rail network in Asia, running to about 40,000 miles by 1947, together with the telegraph and major canal irrigation in the Punjab; but the lines were laid to move troops and export crops to ports rather than to link Indian markets, they were built by British firms on a guaranteed return charged to Indian taxpayers, and the associated tariff policy helped destroy indigenous textile manufacture.

  5. 5

    Assess the record of imperial medicine.

    Model answer

    Britain introduced smallpox vaccination, founded schools of tropical medicine at Liverpool and London at the end of the 1890s, and applied Ross's demonstration of mosquito transmission to malaria control; but the effort was directed first at keeping soldiers, officials and plantation labour fit, coercive anti-plague searches in Bombay in the 1890s provoked riots, and imperial shipping and railways spread disease as effectively as they carried its remedies, as the rinderpest epidemic of the 1890s and the influenza pandemic of 1918 showed.

  6. 6

    How did imperial rule shape national identities?

    Model answer

    Colonial borders drawn for administrative convenience created territories that later became nations, censuses and administrative categories hardened fluid identities into fixed communities and castes, the theory of martial races reorganised army recruitment along ethnic lines, and separate electorates and communal representation in India entrenched religious identity as a political category.

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