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Themes
Browse by subject to discover a wide variety of primary and critical materials on our key topics: Class and Work, Agencies and Institutions, Crime and Punishment, States of Mind, Health and Welfare, Family and Demography, Recreation and Consumption, Rural and Urban Life, Race and Empire and Gender and Sexuality. These short introductions offer a concise overview of ten key areas within British society and have been written by our academic editors, Professor Martin Hewitt and Susie Steinbach.. Click on a subject tile to read an overview of the category and view the relevant primary source documents, secondary source book chapters, journal articles and thematic essays.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind
It is impossible to overstate the impact of British imperialism on world history and culture. During the long nineteenth century Britain was an imperial nation, a polity with sovereignty over other peoples. This was not generally seen as problematic in any way; as historian Philippa Levine has noted, “many Britons firmly believed that imperial supremacy was the national destiny” (Levine, Sunrise to Sunset, 113). The nineteenth-century empire was huge; even though Britain lost most of its North American colonies in 1820, the empire expanded dramatically thereafter, so that by 1914 it comprised one quarter of the world’s population and one fifth of its land. It included holdings in the Caribbean (Jamaica), North America (Canada), South Asia (India), South Africa, and the South Pacific (Australia and New Zealand). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of anti-colonial nationalist movements, leading ultimately to the contraction and end of the empire after World War II.
Britain influenced its empire; it was also influenced by it. Goods, people, and knowledge did not simply flow from Britain; these flowed to the metropole as well, in an endless cycle of influence. People went from Britain to the empire, from the empire to Britain, or throughout the empire for various reasons: they might work as missionaries, civil servants, factory workers, servants, or sex workers, or might move in search of better opportunities. There were many people of South Asian descent (who came from British India, which included modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) in Britain. The Atlantic slave trade was central to British wealth until its abolition in 1833, and there were black communities in Britain, particularly in London, the capital, and in port cities such as Cardiff and Liverpool.
Historically, imperialism and race are connected, and race was an important category and identity in Britain during the long nineteenth century. Human races are social constructions without biological reality, and nineteenth-century ideas about race were very different from twenty-first century ones. People of African, Asian, and European descent were considered to be of different races, which is often the case today. But Jews were also a separate (and suspect) race. The Irish were a different race from the English, in part because they were Catholic (the Italians and the French, also Catholic, were also sometimes seen as racially different). Some differences that today would be described as ethnic or cultural were understood by Victorians as racial.
Imperialism and race are evident in print culture, from high literary texts such as the 1899 poem “White Man’s Burden,” by ‘poet of the empire’ Rudyard Kipling, to cheap adventure novels aimed at boys and young men set in imperial spaces. They also shaped scientific endeavor; much of the classificatory impulse that characterizes nineteenth-century scientific exploration was developed on and in empire.
This Routledge Historical Resource contains several primary source collections in which issues of race and imperialism can be found, including The Great Exhibition, Popular Print Media 1820-1900 and Children and Empire.
Critical analyses include these books: Empire, Education, and Indigenous Childhoods, Photography, Natural History and the Nineteenth Century: Exchanging Views of Empire and Jewish Immigrants in London, 1880-1939.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind