Covering the period from the height of Empire to Brexit and beyond, this book shows how the vote to leave the European Union increased hostilities towards racial and ethnic minorities and migrants. Concentrating on the education system, it asks whether populist views that there should be a British identity - or a Scottish, Irish or Welsh one - will prevail. Alternatively arguments based on equality, human rights and economic needs may prove more powerful. It covers events in politics and education that have left most white British people ignorant of the Empire, the often brutal de-colonisation and the arrival of immigrants from post-colonial and European countries. It discusses politics and practices in education, race, religion and migration that have left schools and universities failing to engage with a multiracial and multicultural society.

Who was Learie Constantine? And what can he tell us about the politics of race and race relations in 20th-century Britain and the Empire? Through examining the life, times and opinions of this Trinidadian cricketer-turned-politician, Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire explores the centrality of race in British politics and society. Unlike conventional biographical studies of Constantine, this unique approach to his life, and the racially volatile context in which it was lived, moves away from the 'good man' narrative commonly attributed to his rise to pre-eminence as a spokesman against racial discrimination and as the first black peer in the House of Lords. Through detailing how Constantine's idea of 'assimilation' was criticized, then later rejected by successive activists in the politics of race, Jeff rey Hill off ers an alternative and more sophisticated analysis of Constantine's contributions to, and complex relationship with, the fight against racial inequalities inherent in British domestic and imperial society.

Prologue : worlds empire made -- Introduction : reckoning with history and empire -- Suppressing anarchy and sedition -- Conflating race and revolution -- Fighting John Bull and Uncle Sam -- Radicalizing Hawai'i -- Red and yellow make orange -- Collaboration and revolution -- Conclusion : America is not in the heart.

The first relational study of twentieth-century U.S. guestworker programs from Mexico and the Caribbean, Contracting Freedom explores how 1940s debates over labor programs elided race and empire while further legitimating and extending U.S. domination abroad in the post-World War II era.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the US government viewed education as one sure way of civilizing “others” under its sway—among them American Indians and, after 1898, Filipinos. Teaching Empire considers how teachers took up this task, first at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in Pennsylvania, opened in 1879, and then in a school system set up amid an ongoing rebellion launched by Filipinos. Drawing upon the records of fifty-five teachers at Carlisle and thirty-three sent to the Philippines—including five who worked in both locations—the book reveals the challenges of translating imperial policy into practice, even for those most dedicated to the imperial mission. These educators, who worked on behalf of the US government, sought to meet the expectations of bureaucrats and supervisors while contending with leadership crises on the ground. In their stories, Elisabeth Eittreim finds the problems common to all classrooms—how to manage students and convey knowledge—complicated by their unique circumstances, particularly the military conflict in the Philippines. Eittreim’s research shows the dilemma presented by these schools’ imperial goal: “pouring in” knowledge that purposefully dismissed and undermined the values, desires, and protests of those being taught. To varying degrees these stories demonstrate both the complexity and fragility of implementing US imperial education and the importance of teachers’ own perspectives. Entangled in US ambitions, racist norms, and gendered assumptions, teachers nonetheless exhibited significant agency, wielding their authority with students and the institutions they worked for and negotiating their roles as powerful purveyors of cultural knowledge, often reinforcing but rarely challenging the then-dominant understanding of “civilization.” Examining these teachers’ attitudes and performances, close-up and in-depth over the years of Carlisle’s operation, Eittreim’s comparative study offers rare insight into the personal, institutional, and cultural implications of education deployed in the service of US expansion—with consequences that reach well beyond the imperial classrooms of the time.

“A truly excellent contribution that unearths new and largely unknown evidence about relationships between Puerto Ricans and African-Americans and white Americans in the continental United States and Puerto Rico. Alamo-Pastrana revises how race is to be studied and understood across national, cultural, colonial, and hierarchical cultural relations.”—Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, author of Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States and its history of intermixture of native, African, and Spanish inhabitants has prompted inconsistent narratives about race and power in the colonial territory. Departing from these accounts, early twentieth-century writers, journalists, and activists scrutinized both Puerto Rico’s and the United States’s institutionalized racism and colonialism in an attempt to spur reform, leaving an archive of oft-overlooked political writings. In Seams of Empire, Carlos Alamo-Pastrana uses racial imbrication as a framework for reading this archive of little-known Puerto Rican, African American, and white American radicals and progressives, both on the island and the continental United States. By addressing the concealed power relations responsible for national, gendered, and class differences, this method of textual analysis reveals key symbolic and material connections between marginalized groups in both national spaces and traces the complexity of race, racism, and conflict on the edges of empire.

When Germany annexed colonies in Africa and the Pacific beginning in the 1880s, many German women were enthusiastic. At the same time, however, they found themselves excluded from what they saw as a great nationalistic endeavor. In German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 Lora Wildenthal untangles the varied strands of racism, feminism, and nationalism that thread through German women’s efforts to participate in this episode of overseas colonization. In confrontation and sometimes cooperation with men over their place in the colonial project, German women launched nationalist and colonialist campaigns for increased settlement and new state policies. Wildenthal analyzes recently accessible Colonial Office archives as well as mission society records, periodicals, women’s memoirs, and fiction to show how these women created niches for themselves in the colonies. They emphasized their unique importance for white racial “purity” and the inculcation of German culture in the family. While pressing for career opportunities for themselves, these women also campaigned against interracial marriage and circulated an image of African and Pacific women as sexually promiscuous and inferior. As Wildenthal discusses, the German colonial imaginary persisted even after the German colonial empire was no longer a reality. The women’s colonial movement continued into the Nazi era, combining with other movements to help turn the racialist thought of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries into the hierarchical evaluation of German citizens as well as colonial subjects. Students and scholars of women’s history, modern German history, colonial politics and culture, postcolonial theory, race/ethnicity, and gender will welcome this groundbreaking study.

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series In the late nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines, which had been newly purchased by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. Motivated by President McKinley’s project of “benevolent assimilation,” they established a school system that centered on English language and American literature to advance the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which was held up as justification for the U.S.’s civilizing mission and offered as a promise of moral uplift and political advancement. Meanwhile, on American soil, the field of American literature was just being developed and fundamentally, though invisibly, defined by this new, extraterritorial expansion. Drawing on a wealth of material, including historical records, governmental documents from the War Department and the Bureau of Insular Affairs, curriculum guides, memoirs of American teachers in the Philippines, and 19th century literature, Meg Wesling not only links empire with education, but also demonstrates that the rearticulation of American literary studies through the imperial occupation in the Philippines served to actually define and strengthen the field. Empire’s Proxy boldly argues that the practical and ideological work of colonial dominance figured into the emergence of the field of American literature, and that the consolidation of a canon of American literature was intertwined with the administrative and intellectual tasks of colonial management.