European Empires and the People: Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Studies in Imperialism, 86)

This is the first book to survey in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The chapters, focusing on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, provide parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The international group of contributors, who are all scholars working at the cutting edge of these fields, place their work in the context of governmental policies, the economic bases of imperial expansion, major events such as wars of conquest, the emergence of myths of heroic action in exotic contexts, religious and missionary impulses, as well as the new media which facilitated such popular dissemination. Among these media were the press, international exhibitions, popular literature, educational institutions and methods, ceremonies, church sermons and lectures, monuments, paintings and much else. Front matter 1 Contents 6 List of illustrations 8 Contributors 10 Introduction by John MacKenzie 12 Exalting imperial grandeur: the French Empire and its metropolitan public 30 Passion or indifference? Popular imperialism in Britain: continuities and discontinuities over two centuries 68 Songs of an imperial underdog: imperialism and popular culture in the Netherlands, 1870–1960 101 Learning to love Leopold: Belgian popular imperialism, 1830–1960 135 Imagination and beyond: cultures and geographies of imperialism in Germany, 1848–1918 169 ‘The peasants did not think of Africa’: empire and the Italian state’s pursuit of legitimacy, 1871–1945 206 Afterword by Matthew G. Stanard 240 Index 246 The first book to survey, in a comparative form, the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries. It provides fascinating parallel studies of France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, examining the media and the content through which events in colonial empires were broadcast into the popular domain. -- . Compares the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries (France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Italy) in the 19th and 20th centuries, providing parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events were given wider popular visibility in each Examining the ways in which the BBC constructed and disseminated British national identity during the second quarter of the 20th century, this text focuses on how the BBC, through its radio programmes, tried to represent what it meant to be British