This book examines British imperial, colonial and postcolonial national identities within their political and social contexts. By considering the export, adoption and creation of such cultural identities, these essays show how nationhood and nationalism are self-consciously defined tools designed to focus and inspire loyalty. The contributors present these ideas with particular reference to English cultural identity and its interaction with the "Empire". They examine the national, imperial and colonial aesthetic--how architecture, landscape, painting, sculpture and literature were used, appropriated and re-appropriated in the furtherance of social and political agendas, and how this impacted on the making of "Britishness" in all its complexities. It is demonstrated that not only did the dominant aesthetic culture reinforce the dominant political and social ideology, it also re-presented and re-constructed the notion of British national identity.

For almost two centuries, the category of 'applied science' was widely taken to be both real and important. Then, its use faded. How could an entire category of science appear and disappear? By taking a longue durée approach to British attitudes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Robert Bud explores the scientific and cultural trends that led to such a dramatic rise and fall. He traces the prospects and consequences that gave the term meaning, from its origins to its heyday as an elixir to cure many of the economic, cultural, and political ills of the UK, eventually overtaken by its competitor, 'technology'. Bud examines how 'applied science' was shaped by educational and research institutions, sociotechnical imaginaries, and political ideologies and explores the extent to which non-scientific lay opinion, mediated by politicians and newspapers, could become a driver in the classification of science.

Examines the key roles of Scots in central aspects of the Atlantic and imperial economies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and demonstrates that an understanding of the relationship between Scotland and the British Empire is vital both for the understanding of the histories of that country and of many territories of the Empire.

Rethinking settler colonialism focuses on the long history of contact between indigenous peoples and the white colonial communities who settled in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. It interrogates how histories of colonial settlement have been mythologised, narrated and embodied in public culture in the twentieth century (through monuments, exhibitions and images) and charts some of the vociferous challenges to such histories that have emerged over recent years. Despite a shared familiarity with cultural and political institutions, practices and policies amongst the white settler communities, the distinctiveness which marked these constituencies as variously, ‘Australian’, ‘South African’, ‘Canadian’ or ‘New Zealander’, was fundamentally contingent upon their relationship to and with the various indigenous communities they encountered. In each of these countries these communities were displaced, marginalised and sometimes subjected to attempted genocide through the colonial process. Recently these groups have renewed their claims for greater political representation and autonomy. The essays and artwork in this book insist that an understanding of the political and cultural institutions and practices which shaped settler-colonial societies in the past can provide important insights into how this legacy of unequal rights can be contested in the present. It will be of interest to those studying the effects of colonial powers on indigenous populations, and the legacies of imperial rule in postcolonial societies.