Tag: colonialism
Primary Sources: Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories
The Gale digital archive Decolonization: Politics and Independence in Former Colonial and Commonwealth Territories includes primary sources related to the complex process of decolonization across 60 former colonial territories and Commonwealth nations in the 20th century. The core content consists of over 250,000 pages of rare pamphlets, newsletters, correspondence, posters, and other ephemera produced by political parties, pressure groups, trade unions, and grassroots movements. This includes the Political Pamphlets collection from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, African Trade Union pamphlets from Nuffield College at Oxford, and the Marjorie Nicholson Papers on international trade unionism.
This archive is structured into thematic sections that address different facets of decolonization. These sections cover topics such as the rise of nationalist movements, key figures who led their nations to independence, and the residual impacts of colonial rule including economic dependencies and the development of new national identities. Additionally, it explores the involvement of international bodies like the United Nations in supporting decolonization efforts.
Primary Sources: Indian Army and Colonial Warfare on the Frontiers of India, 1914-1920
The Library has recently acquired Indian Army and Colonial Warfare on the Frontiers of India, 1914-1920, part of the India Office Records held by the British Library (IOR/L/MIL/17/5/4115).
For generations of British and Indian Officers and men, the North-West Frontier was the scene of repeated skirmishes and major campaigns against the trans-border Pathan tribes who inhabited the mountainous no-man’s land between India and Afghanistan. This collection contains Army Lists; Orders; Instructions; Regulations; Acts; Manuals; Strength Returns; Orders of Battle; Administration Summaries; organization, commissions, committees, reports, maneuvers; departments of the Indian Army; and regimental narratives.
Primary Sources: Empire Online database
Empire Online includes over 70,000 pages of primary source materials divided into five thematic sections:
- Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969
- Literature and Empire
- The Visible Empire
- Religion and Empire
- Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism c1607-2007
The majority of the documents are in English and relate to the British Empire, but there are also resources on French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and German imperialism. This is by no means a comprehensive collection of resources, but includes a good balance of perspectives about empire represented in a variety of material types: stories, diaries, exhibition catalogs, exploration logs, letter books and correspondence, marketing posters, official government documents, travel writing, photographs, slave papers, maps, missionary papers, and many more. The sources were selected from major libraries and museums in the UK, Canada, Australia, and United States.
Access the contents of Empire Online by browsing the documents in each section, searching for keywords across all the sections, or browsing indexed names, topics, and places. Note that when doing keyword searches you should use British spelling conventions. The search engine searches across all document level metadata including bibliographic details, full text of printed material and selected additional editorial features. (Full text searching of handwritten materials is not possible.) Because the searches are, as described in the FAQ, “carried out at document level for all documents and also at image level for full text search documents, this means that “a search for polygamy AND Africa will find hits … where both appear on a page but also where polygamy appears on page 1 and Africa on page 100 of the same document.” For better search results, you should conduct searches for phrases or words within a certain proximity of each other.
Secondary sources include thematic essays on imperialism and colonialism, biographies, and a chronology of exploration and colonization from 3200 BC to the present.