Cannadine proposes an approach centered on the power and appeal of social hierarchy across metropole and colonies that he claims provides a better explanation of empire than one linked to Edward W. Said's critique of Orientalism and concerned with discourses of racial difference and inequality. A gifted writer, Cannadine drives his wide-ranging argument from beginning to end of Ornamentalism. Part 1, "Beginnings," examines British responses to the hierarchical nature of Native American and Mughal Indian societies and efforts to establish hierarchically ordered societies in Ireland and the Americas. Part 2, "Localities," brings out the hierarchical structure and image of the dominions, India, African and Asian colonies, and Middle Eastern mandatories. Part 3, "Generalities," focuses on the imperial scope and role of the honors system and the monarchy and then expounds Cannadine's argument at greater length. The British perceived their colonial subjects more often in terms of "rank" than "race" (123) and conceived of the empire as a traditional and even "anti-capitalist" (128) projection of their own society. This part of the book concludes with a consideration of some of the forces undermining imperial hierarchy, from the political opposition of metropolitan radicalism, dominion nationalism, and anticolonial nationalism to the technological developments of "imperial modernity" (149). Part 4, "Endings," connects the end of empire to the end of hierarchy in British society, although in Schumpeterian fashion Cannadine does note hierarchical survivals. An appendix, "An Imperial Childhood?," offers reminiscences of growing up and coming of age in Britain between the 1950s and early 1970s as this core society experienced the unnamed metropolitan variant of what we call decolonization in peripheral societies.
Ornamentalism clearly conveys the fact that the British and their far-flung collaborators developed flexible and, at least for a time, relatively stable modes of colonial rule. Cannadine's historical-sociological approach allows him to deal with such political forms as "indirect rule" and "responsible government" without descending into a dry constitutional account of the empire. Discussing architectural style, ceremonial display, royal travels, and the distribution of honors, Cannadine highlights the "dignified" side of the empire. As a result of this "essentially ornamental mode" of rule (122), local elites, both indigenous and settler, found accommodation and incorporation within a wider imperial hierarchy. Indeed, Cannadine holds up for inspection the hierarchical origins of supposedly modern egalitarian nations like Australia and New Zealand. Not confining himself to the boundaries of the nineteenth-century empire, he usefully reminds us of Britain's export of monarchy to Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and elsewhere in the Middle East after the First World War.
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It is here that the work of artists challenges our conventional ways of viewing and interpreting public sculpture. In what follows I present five works that use monuments to Victoria as their subject and material, whether the object itself in situ or a photograph or cast of the statue.12 Rather than counter-monumental, we might identify these works as counter-ceremonial. Ceremonial was always the principal means of animating the statue and realizing its potential for ideological efficacy.13 From unveilings, through annual celebrations of nation and empire, to the marking of occasions such as state funerals, monuments to Victoria across the empire were the focal point, giving meaning to public space and delimiting the public itself, in that ceremonial affirmed the criteria for inclusion or exclusion. In Brisbane the annual Empire Day celebrations began at and revolved around the statue of Victoria, decorated for the occasion, and, as elsewhere, included parades, pageants, the awarding of certificates to children for helping or supporting troops or similar acts of loyalty, and marches for the veterans of imperial wars in Crimea, Sudan, and South Africa.14 The protest in Brisbane in 2021 was a kind of counter-ceremonial; indeed, it replicated the performances of Empire Day, with Victoria as the spatial and political focus, the speech given alongside the effigy, the use of flags, the adorning of the statue (but with paint rather than flowers), and the march spreading from the monument through the space of the city. It was a thoroughgoing reversal of the historical ceremony, thus reversing the values of the monument and exposing what the image of Victoria had banished from public view. 2ff7e9595c
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