Table Of ContentOxford Scholarship Online
Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas
Robert Bickers
ABSTRACT
The British Empire gave rise to various new forms of British identity in the colonial world outside
the Dominions. In cities and colonies, and in sovereign states subject to more informal pressures,
such as Argentina or China, communities of Britons developed and they developed identities
inflected by local ambitions and pressures. As a result they often found themselves at loggerheads
with their diplomatic or colonial office minders, especially in the era of decolonization. The
impact of empire on metropolitan British identity is increasingly well documented; the evolution
of dominions' natio ... More
Keywords: settlers, expatriates, colonialism, migration, history, British Empire
BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Print publication date: 2010 Print ISBN-13: 9780199297672
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297672.001.0001
AUTHORS
Affiliations are at time of print
publication.
Robert Bickers, editor
Professor of History, University
of Bristol
Author Webpage
Contents Go to page: Go
Front Matter
Title Pages
The Oxford History of the British Empire
Contributors
1 Introduction: Britains and Britons over the Seas
Robert Bickers
2 The British of Argentina
David Rock
3 Expatriates in Cosmopolitan Egypt: 1864–1956
James Whidden
4 Kenya
John Lonsdale
5 Rhodesia 1890–1980
Donal Lowry
6 ‘The Last Outpost’
John Lambert
7 Avatars of Identity
David Washbrook
8 ‘Permanent Boarders’
Margaret Jones
9 The British ‘Malayans’
Tim Harper
10 Shanghailanders and Others
Robert Bickers
11 ‘We Don't Grow Coffee and Bananas in Clapham Junction You Know!’
Elizabeth Buettner
12 Orphans of Empire
John Darwin
End Matter
Index
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Title Pages
Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas
Robert Bickers
Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199297672
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297672.001.0001
Title Pages
Companion Series
(p.i) The Oxford History of the British Empire
(p.ii) The Oxford History of the British Empire
Settlers and Expatriates
Volume I. The Origins of Empire
EDITED BY Nicholas Canny
Volume II. The Eighteenth Century
EDITED BY P. J. Marshall
Volume III. The Nineteenth Century
EDITED BY Andrew Porter
Volume IV. The Twentieth Century
EDITED BY Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis
Volume V. Historiography
EDITED BY Robin W. Winks
(p.iv)
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The Oxford History of the British Empire
Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas
Robert Bickers
Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199297672
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297672.001.0001
(p.iii) The Oxford History of the British
Empire
Companion Series
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Contributors
Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas
Robert Bickers
Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199297672
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297672.001.0001
(p.vi) Contributors
ROBERT BICKERS is Professor of History, University of Bristol, and the author
of Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism (1999), Empire Made
Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003), and The Scramble for China
(forthcoming, 2011).
ELIZABETH BUETTNER is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of York.
Her publications include Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (2004)
in addition to articles in the Journal of Modern History, Ab Imperio, History and
Memory, the Scottish Historical Review, and elsewhere. She is completing a
comparative study entitled Europe After Empire: Decolonization, Society, and
Culture.
JOHN DARWIN teaches Imperial and Global History at Oxford where he is a
Fellow of Nuffield College. His most recent books are After Tamerlane: The
Global History of Empire since 1405 (2007) and The Empire Project: The Rise
and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (2009).
TIM HARPER is Reader in Southeast Asian and Imperial History, University of
Cambridge, and a Fellow of Magdalene College. He is the author of The End of
Empire and the Making of Malaya (1999) and, with Christopher Bayly, Forgotten
Armies: The Fall of Britain's Asian Empire, 1941–45 (2004) and Forgotten Wars:
The End of Britain's Asian Empire (2007).
MARGARET JONES is a Research Associate of the Wellcome Unit for the History
of Medicine at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Health Policy in
Britain's Model Colony: Ceylon, 1900–1948 (2004) and The Hospital System and
Health Care: Sri Lanka, 1815–1960 (2009). She has also published articles on
the medical and social history of Hong Kong and Jamaica.
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Contributors
JOHN LAMBERT is a Professor Emeritus and Research Fellow in the Department
of History at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. He has published widely
in the field of Natal studies and on the history both of (p.vii) African society in
colonial Natal and of white English‐speaking identity in Natal and in South
Africa generally. His monograph, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in
Colonial Natal (1995) examines the emergence and decline of an African
peasantry in colonial Natal and the relationship between Africans and British
settlers in the colony.
JOHN LONSDALE is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Emeritus
Professor of Modern African History. He is co‐author, with Bruce Berman, of
Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya in Africa (1992), and was President of the
African Studies Association of the United Kingdom, 2000.
DONAL LOWRY is Reader in Imperial History and Head of the Department of
History at Oxford Brookes University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical
Society and is book review editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies. He
has published articles and essays on imperial, dominion, southern African, and
Irish topics and is currently completing a history of Ireland's imperial
connections for Cambridge University Press.
DAVID ROCK , a Professor of History at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of
Argentina. His books include Argentina 1516–1987 (1987) and State Formation
and Political Movements in Argentina 1860–1916 (2002). He is completing a
book on the British community in Argentina 1806 to the present.
DAVID WASHBROOK is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Previously, he taught at Warwick, Oxford, and Harvard Universities and at the
University of Pennsylvania. His principal interests lie in the history of southern
India between the seventeenth and twenty‐first centuries on which he has
published extensively.
JAMES WHIDDEN is currently an associate professor at Acadia University. His
Ph.D. was completed at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, where he studied Egypt and North Africa. He has published articles in
the Journal of North African Studies, Encyclopedia of African History, and the
collection, Re‐envisioning Egypt 1919–1952 (2005). (p.viii)
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Introduction: Britains and Britons over the Seas
Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas
Robert Bickers
Print publication date: 2010
Print ISBN-13: 9780199297672
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297672.001.0001
Introduction: Britains and Britons over the
Seas
Robert Bickers (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199297672.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter lays out the rationale for this volume, noting that the British
themselves were largely excluded from the Oxford History of the British Empire,
but have now become a prime focus for research exploring a number of themes
(British world identities, imperial networks). It presents three case studies of
cross‐empire lives which raise many of the issues that are explored by
subsequent essays: domicile, identity, belonging, alienation, the role of the press,
the evolution of a self‐consciously ‘colonial’ or empire British caste or
community. The porosity of categories is clear, sojourners became settlers,
settlers found themselves sojourning as their luck or world politics changed.
Britons might be in turn settler then sojourner, or serially both or either. The
roots of British migration today lie in the propensity to emigration that the era of
British imperial and global dominance demanded.
Keywords: British, history, migration, settlers, sojourners, press, identity, domicile, networks
The British empire was never static; neither were its peoples. They moved by
choice, or were moved by compulsion. Individual circumstance or state policy
often blurred the difference. Other volumes in this series highlight the
movements of the enslaved, the indentured, the punished, and the colonized.
They discuss the major movements of British nationals into the dominions—as
well as return and onward migration, and the Irish experience of empire.
Settlement and the resulting development of new nationalisms and identities has
been a clear and dominating theme. But Britons were also of course service
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Introduction: Britains and Britons over the Seas
sojourners too. They went ‘out’, they served their careers, and they returned
‘home’.1 Chapters in volumes iii and iv of the Oxford History of the British
Empire explored the various colonial administrative services through which the
imperial state governed its multifaceted empire, and also the experience of those
in military service.2 But the overseas Britons outside the dominions, and outside
the colonial or military services, generally fall outside the major categories of
research. The non‐officials and unofficials, traders, planters, men and women in
the professions, and in service trades, state functionaries at all levels—police,
public works and health, customs, merchant marine, railways—and the
entrepreneurs who (p.2) filled the remaining gaps—journalists and hoteliers,
for example—all of these together formed significant populations of their own.
This volume explores a cross‐section of such communities in the world of formal
empire and informal influence—the latter encompassing wide degrees of power
relations between the British and other states and indigenous populations—and
while it places them within their discrete geographical contexts, it explores
commonalities, and demonstrates how strongly these overseas Britons were
interwoven into the fabric of the imperial experience that is more readily
recognized by patterns of scholarship.
The numbers are striking enough overall. Between 1900 and 1909, for example,
almost 1,700,000 Britons migrated overseas. In the 1920s the total was over
1,800,000. Forty‐five per cent of them went to non‐empire destinations (mostly
the United States, but also to many of the regions covered in this volume), and
increasingly they moved in the twentieth century to the empire, and
overwhelmingly to the settler dominions.3 These net emigration figures hide the
scale of remigration—40 per cent of English and Welsh migrants returned
between 1870 and 1914—and patterns of chain and serial migration are also
hard to follow.4 Migrants returned, and they also kept in touch. They wrote, they
summoned out their brides and siblings, they revisited, and they remitted.
Migration often sundered ties, but mostly it knitted people together in new ways.
The complex webs of obligation and financial responsibility which continued to
link migrants with their families at home are being uncovered.5 As the ‘Neo‐
Britains’—the white settler societies—garnered the largest share of empire
migration, they have also received the largest share of scholarly attention, but
the mini‐Britains, built from the same blocks, are thereby overshadowed. These
are the British communities in Ceylon, Egypt, and India, in British Malaya,
Argentina, and beyond. They too developed new identities, or new inflections of
familiar identities, as much as did the British‐Australians, and the British‐
Canadians. They sometimes had an impact on their adopted or adapted home
out of all proportion to the gross numbers. Ten thousand Britons in (p.3)
Shanghai did inadvertent wonders for nascent Chinese nationalism in the mid‐
1920s.
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