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Laura Herron Dissertation 2014.pdf (1.99 MB)

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Borderlands: The British Empire and the Negotiation of Englishness, 1864-1914

Herron, Laura Bender
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1408863223

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, History.
In the late nineteenth century, Britain reigned supreme among the European powers, with an imperial reach into almost every corner of the globe. Britons living in the metropole imagined their empire as at once very distant and very close to home. It was, of course, distant physically but also in the sense that the people who lived in places such as Africa and India were viewed by Britons as very different from themselves. However, the idea of empire was also very immediate for Britons because it was intimately linked with how they saw themselves as part of an exceptional national community, defined by particularly English values such as liberty, charity, honor, and duty. In an era rife with social and geopolitical insecurities, when some feared that Britain’s military and economic power might be waning, the Empire was symbolic of national greatness. This was not simply due to its size. Most Britons believed that the extension of English culture throughout the Empire improved upon the lives of the people who inhabited it. The distant reaches of the British Empire, as imagined in Britain, were national frontiers—the limits of the extension of Englishness. This work proposes that those frontiers were experienced on the ground as complex borderlands in which the idea of Englishness was often fluid. It substantiates its claim of tension between the vision of empire projected from the metropole and its actual experience on the ground by presenting three cases in which the supposedly stable concept of Englishness was negotiated—those of Emin Pasha, Gottlieb Leitner, and Rudolf Slatin. Each of these men was involved, in some manner, with the British governance of Sudan or India between 1864 and 1914 but none was British by birth. Their experiences shed light on the limits and inconsistencies of the “frontier perspective” projected from the metropole. They also illustrate the powerful realities this perspective created. The objective of this work is not to disprove the veracity of either the “frontier perspective” or the “borderlands perspective,” but to examine the relationship between the two from the standpoints of individuals concomitantly identified as “English” and “Other.”
Alan Beyerchen, Ph.D. (Advisor)
Robin Judd, Ph.D. (Advisor)
Jane Hathaway, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
221 p.
History
British Empire; Sudan; Punjab

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Citations

  • Herron, L. B. (2014). Borderlands: The British Empire and the Negotiation of Englishness, 1864-1914 [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1408863223

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Herron, Laura. Borderlands: The British Empire and the Negotiation of Englishness, 1864-1914 . 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1408863223.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Herron, Laura. "Borderlands: The British Empire and the Negotiation of Englishness, 1864-1914 ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1408863223

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1408863223
552
© 2014, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.