Tamson Pietsch

Empire of scholars: Universities, networks and the British academic world, 1850–1939

General Editors introduction Introduction Part I: Foundations, 1802-80 1. Building institutions Part II: Connections, 1880-1914 2. Forging links 3. Making appointments 4. Imperial association Part III: Networks, 1900-39 5. Academic traffic 6. The Great War 7. After the peace Part IV: Erosions, 1919-60 8. Alternate ties Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index

A British sea: making sense of global space in the late nineteenth century

It is the contention of this article that historians of the nineteenth century need to think about notions of empire, nation, and race in the context of the social production of space. More specifically, it posits that the moving space of the steamship functioned as a particularly important site in which travellers reworked ideas about themselves and their worlds. Supporting this contention the article pays close attention to the journeys of J. T. Wilson, a young Scottish medical student who between 1884 and 1887 made three voyages to China and one to Australia. For it was in the space of the ship, literally moving along the routes of global trade, that Wilson forged a particular kind of British identity that collapsed the spaces of empire, elided differences among Britons and extended the boundaries of the British nation.

Many Rhodes: travelling scholarships and imperial citizenship in the British academic world, 1880–1940

Since its Foundation in 1901, the Rhodes Scholarships scheme has been held up as the archetype of a programme designed to foster imperial citizens. However, though impressive in scale, Cecil Rhodes’s foundation was not the first to bring colonial students to Britain. Over the course of the previous half-century, governments, universities and individuals in the settler colonies had been establishing travelling scholarships for this purpose. In fact by the end of the nineteenth century the travelling scholarship had become an important part of settler universities’ educational visions. It served as a crucial mechanism by which they sought to claim their citizenship of what they saw as the expansive British academic world.

Bodies at sea: travelling to Australia in the age of sail

This article considers the bodily experience of being at sea in the age of sail. Using shipboard diaries written by eight passengers during the high period of free migration to the Australasian colonies, it argues that oceanic journeys disrupted and upended the land-based bodily practices being fashioned in nineteenth-century Britain. At sea, these mechanisms of bodily comportment were rendered fragile and unstable, leaving middle- and working-class bodies alike vulnerable and open to refashioning and reformation. In so doing, it points to the need for scholars to bring together land- and sea-based histories and to historicize and particularize oceanic spaces.

Geographies of Selection: Academic Appointments in the British Academic World, 1850–1939

This chapter considers the changing appointment practices of universities in late nineteenth century Britain and its empire. It shows that their reliance on the private knowledge of key men in Britain worked to extend the networks of British scholarship far beyond the British Isles. However, as the chapter goes on to show, this reliance also meant that universities’ measures of expertise were contingent upon cultures of academic sociability that were heavily raced and gendered. It suggests that the technologies of selection used by settler universities helped to create a British academic world that was both expansive and exclusionary, and points to the way the boundaries and contours of this world were mapped, not just by mileage, but also by the density and reach of personal connections.

Universities, war and the professionalization of dentistry

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to bring together the history of war, the universities and the professions. It examines the case of dentistry in New South Wales, detailing its divided pre-war politics, the role of the university, the formation and work of the Dental Corps during the First World War, and the process of professionalization in the 1920s. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on documentary and archival sources including those of the University of Sydney, contemporary newspapers, annual reports and publication of various dental associations, and on secondary sources. Findings The paper argues that both the war and the university were central to the professionalization of dentistry in New South Wales. The war transformed the expertise of dentists, shifted their social status and cemented their relationship with the university. Originality/value This study is the first to examine dentistry in the context of the histories of war, universities and professionalization. It highlights the need to re-evaluate the changing place of the professions in interwar Australia in the light both of the First World War and of the university’s involvement in it.

The shouting in the dark

unnoticed by her” (65). Although vividly and sometimes painfully described, the account of Asha’s determination to learn, to better herself and finally to attain a place at Oxford University has a dash of smugness about it and reminds us of other novels one has read, and not just from India, which depict a struggle for education and, by that means, for recognition. Where this novel takes off, in a brutal and graphic manner, is in the story of Asha’s determination, against her family’s wishes and against custom, to marry her handsome fellow student, Anand. Defiant and self-willed, Asha is also seeking to be loved unconditionally, to fulfil herself sexually and to show that she is a modern free-spirited woman who is not going to be moulded by her relatives into a made-to-measure traditional bride. What Asha fails to pick up on are the hints of a desire to control, which Anand displays from the start, and which eventually turn rapacious and violent. For this novel is a powerful study of domestic abuse. Anand is a cheat, a liar, an intellectual dud, but he is physically strong and he continues to be the object of Asha’s tenderest feelings until it becomes impossible for her to harbour them any more. Though this is an account of one marriage only, there can be no doubt that Acharya is describing a state of affairs facing countless women in the world. It is only recently that India has woken up to the full horror of uxorial mistreatment which so many of its women experience every day, expressing itself, as here, through attacks on their bodies, denial of basic rights and exposure to family ridicule and ostracism. Asha at least has the scholarly skills to climb away from this tyranny, an option open to very few of her compatriots. Shanta Acharya has written a compulsive and at times heart-wrenching book, which deserves much wider circulation than it may get. It tells us a great deal about the inner life of an Indian woman who declines to be processed by tradition and who yet feels complex umbilical ties to her family and country which moving overseas will not resolve. This is a novel which cries out for a sequel, Oxford and after, and Acharya has clearly shown that she has sufficiently powerful narrative drive to make something exceptional of it.

Between the Nation and the World: J.T. Wilson and Scientific Networks in the Early Twentieth Century

The categories of ‘metropole’ and ‘colony’ have long been fundamental to scholars’ imagination of empire. However in recent years, against the background of the contemporary consciousness of global forces, migration and postcolonialism, historians from both Great Britain and from the countries that previously fell under its influence have started to question their utility.1 Increasingly, the work of researchers has focused instead on the complex connections and the multiple and mutually constitutive practices that occurred between those who lived in and across imperial spaces. In doing so it has also challenged the partition of domestic and national from imperial history.

Universities, expertise and the First World War

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to: introduce the topic of the relationship between universities and the First World War historiographically; put university expertise and knowledge at the centre of studies of the First World War; and explain how an examination of university expertise and war reveals a continuity of intellectual and scientific activity from war to peace. Design/methodology/approach Placing the papers in the special issue of HER on universities and war in the context of a broader historiography of the First World War and its aftermath. Findings The interconnections between university expertise and the First World War is a neglected field, yet its examination enriches the current historiography and prompts us to see the war not simply in terms of guns and battles but also how the battlefield extended university expertise with long-lasting implications into the 1920s and 1930s. Originality/value The paper explores how universities and their expertise – e.g. medical, artistic, philosophical – were mobilised in the First World War and the following peace.

The University at War, 1914–25: Britain, France and the United States, by Tomás Irish, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 254 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-137-40944-7

A shift is taking place in the history of universities. Influenced both by the turn to transnational history and by the politics of higher education in our own time, writing on the history of unive...