Browsing by Subject "British Empire"
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Item Constructing and Contesting “the Girlhood of Our Empire”: Girls’ Culture, Labor, and Mobility in Britain, South Africa, and New Zealand, c. 1830-1930(2019-04) Dillenburg, ElizabethThis dissertation studies girls’ complex, often paradoxical roles in the British Empire and analyzes how discussions about the education, employment, and emigration of girls both reflected and shaped broader political, economic, and social debates. Although girls are marginalized in studies of colonialism, concerted efforts to educate and emigrate girls reveal how the project of empire building depended on the mobility and labor of girls and young women. This dissertation begins by considering the ways in which youth organizations sought to transform girls into “empire builders” and girls’ roles as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators and transmitters of colonial knowledge. Girls supported the empire, but they also challenged systems of colonial power and resisted prescribed roles in various ways, from penning criticisms of false imperial propaganda to absconding from exploitative situations. While most histories of childhood focus on one region, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” employs a multi-sited framework that examines girlhood in different areas of the empire—concentrating specifically on Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa—to elucidate variations within broader colonial processes. As explored in the second part of the dissertation, emigration programs for British girls to New Zealand and South Africa faced innumerable obstacles, and their limited success exposed fault lines within the colonial project. The third part of the dissertation focuses debates over the employment of African and Māori girls as domestic servants in British colonial households and how these debates reveal the ways in which ideas of girlhood and girls’ lives were intertwined with conceptualizations of the nation, empire, and race. The nature of the colonial archive means that girls’ experiences rarely appear in the traditional sources, but their voices do emerge in letters they wrote to family and friends, articles they composed for children’s periodicals, scrapbooks they crafted, and photographs and artwork they created. Utilizing these myriad sources, “Constructing and Contesting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’” provides new insights into girls’ roles in the empire and more nuanced understandings of how class, race, and geography mediated girls’ experiences of and engagement with colonialism.Item Empire of Ice: Arctic Natural History and British Visions of the North, 1500-1800(2019-05) Miller, EmelinThis dissertation uses methods from history of science and environmental history to understand how British imperialists—politicians, fur traders, and naturalists—rationalized the Arctic between 1550 and 1800. Through early modern understandings of natural history, geography, and medicine, Britons crafted a narrative of the north that positioned it as a British colonial landscape ripe for exploration and exploitation. Beginning with the first English settlement in the New World on a northern island in Baffin Bay, I explore how English imperialists John Dee and Richard Hakluyt used Arthurian legends, classical geography, and the rhetoric of empiricism to cast the north as a place that was in need of British governance and necessary for the success of the British Empire. The second chapter examines how Hudson’s Bay Company employees who made observations about northern wildlife and climate experienced the north in the early eighteenth century. For fur trader-naturalists, provisioning food was a central preoccupation in conveying to Europeans the habitability of northern lands, especially in the context of paternalist attitudes towards indigenous peoples. This is juxtaposed with a debate over the existence of the Northwest Passage, highlighting the political stakes of making knowledge claims about northern climates. The third chapter examines how eighteenth-century Britons overlaid European ideas of health upon northern indigenous peoples to justify Hudson’s Bay Company treatments of Cree and Athapascan employees: in short, cold climates produced dispassionate behaviors in native peoples, making them immune to the effects of illness, pain, and emotional abuse. This contrasted with Britons who attested to the health of northern climates, calling into question European criteria about healthfulness. The last chapter focuses on the late eighteenth-century Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant who viewed the Arctic as part of the British Empire, and wrote a natural history of Arctic Zoology, positioning the north geographically within the confines of British sovereignty over nature. Ultimately, each chapter demonstrates the long history of British claims of possession over the Far North, priming it for exploration in the nineteenth century, and reminding us that scientific knowledge can work to dispossess indigenous peoples and construct monolithic and damaging environmental narratives.Item Savages or citizens? children, education, and the British Empire, 1899-1950.(2009-08) Neiwert, Rachel AnnThis dissertation focuses on the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason (1841/42-1923) and her educational organizations, the Parents' National Educational Union (PNEU) and the Parents' Union School (PUS) to better understand how white, English children living in the British Empire learned what it meant to be English during the years 1899 to 1950. Through the PUS, Mason provided an organized home-school curriculum to families living abroad that promised to solidify an English national identity in their children. Mason's educational philosophy built on New Liberal conceptions of the individual and extended them to children. PUS children's schoolwork and letters demonstrate that they were not just passive recipients of lessons on "place and race" but actively participated in shaping a new sense of Englishness.