Media And The British Empire

'The only true history of a country', wrote Thomas Macaulay, 'is to be found in its newspapers.' Yet in the past scholars of imperial history and of the media have worked in separate, compartmentalized spheres and it is only recently that an integrationist approach has been taken towards studying the imperial experience. This book explores how the media shaped and defined the economic, social, political and cultural dynamics of the British Empire by viewing it from the perpective of the colonised as well as the colonisers.

The 14 broad-ranging and innovative essays in this collection examine the role of media and communications in shaping the British imperial experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With perspectives drawn from both the peripheral context of the colonized and the metropolitan gaze of the colonizers, revealing new light is shed upon the part played by media institutions in shaping the political, economic, social and cultural dynamics of the British colonies and Dominions.

The contributors seek to situate the role of media in the context of the empire and in the process throw light on the history of the media itself - in each case exhibiting sensitivity to the problematic relationship between media and the practice of imperial domination, of the economics of news collection and distribution, as well as the differing viewpoints of producers and consumers. The communication-media examined include electric telegraphs and news agencies, newspapers (nation, provincial and local), books and printed ephemera, newsreels and wireless. In geographic terms, the coverage of the essays is equally wide, with contributions relating to South Africa, Kenya, Central Africa and Bechuanaland, Britain and the Indian sub-continent, Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, Canada and Malaya.

Chandrika Kaul is Lecturer in Modern British and Imperial History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.