Instituting nation and empire in the modern British world

This dissertation explores the dilemmas British subjects faced in their efforts to universalize “British” institutions across a diverse multinational empire during the long nineteenth century. The United Kingdom’s four constituent nations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, alongside its myriad overseas colonies, represented a political experiment predicated on the foundational fiction that national and imperial interests could be made to serve one another. “Instituting Nation and Empire” analyzes three characteristically British institutions contemporaries imagined would unite Britain’s global populace: universities, local parliaments, and the monarchy. For many, the expectation that these institutions should take on distinctly “national” characters – whether Irish, Welsh, Indian, Jamaican, or Australian – itself became a unifying British ideal. But reconstituting the frequently siloed histories of Four-Nations Britain and its empire reveals how these institutions also became sites of conflict and tension that exacerbated fault lines within and among the Four Nations, between the Four Nations and their empire, and between colonies. Fundamental questions about liberal governance, sovereignty, and identity loomed large over seemingly minute squabbles about who these representative institutions were for.This transnational, polycentric study demonstrates how the British state’s uneven response to these micro-dramas stoked enduring rivalries, worsened fundamental inequities, and established racialized governing systems across its realms. White settler Australians got their national university at Sydney in 1850, while Black West Africans’ campaign failed twenty years later. Racialized Irish and Indian populations were coerced into accepting universities which served imperial needs but did not reflect their distinct national characters. Similarly, the imperial parliament granted “responsible government” to white settlers in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, but outright suspended the constitution in majority-Black Jamaica to prevent representative government there. Meanwhile, British Liberals dismantled their own party – which had previously espoused the value of political inclusion – in an attempt to deny Catholic Ireland “home rule.” Even the post-“mutiny” effort to bind Britain and India together by formally adding “Empress of India” to Victoria’s titles disrupted global British racial hierarchies; the change prompted a delegation of Canadians, Australians, and South Africans to demand “the Dominions” also be added, ahead of non-white India in the formal ordering. Juxtaposing these disparate conflicts offers a dynamic history of white settler colonialism by showing how the British state institutionalized a preoccupation with social and racial hierarchy which ultimately divided national and imperial interests. It also provides a genealogy of Britain’s approach to decolonization in the twentieth century, including the unequivocal non-decolonization of its white Dominions.

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