Steamships removed the message speed limit imposed by horses and sails, and telegraphy made communication almost instantaneous. Top state sizes expanded accordingly. Graphs superimpose the growth–decline curves of major post−1800 Engineer Empires. Britain became the largest empire ever (24% of world dry land area), but it lasted at more than half of its maximum size only for 110 years, comparable to nomad Xiongnu. State collapse in China also made Britain briefly the most populous of the world, due to its control of India. For most of the Engineer period Russia has been the largest and China (Qing and People’s Republic) the most populous. India’s population surpassed China’s in 2023. At the 1925 peak of European domination, 64% of Earth’s dry land area was ruled from Europe. It is now down to 21%, mainly Siberia. But European-stock Russia, USA, Canada, Brazil, and Australia remain part of the top seven, along with China and India. Population proportions differ. Since 1800, six to ten states have held more than 2% of Earth’s dry land area. Every half-century, three to four have entered or exited this category. By this pattern, 2000−2050 has been unusually quiet, up to now.

This chapter considers how and in what contexts the reasonable person standard was applied by the selected colonial courts of the British Empire. The key question is whether the reasonable person imported from England remained English in substance – whether it continued to resemble a man on the Clapham omnibus – or the courts tailored the standard to the specific circumstances before them. As the first section shows, there are many cases in which the reasonable person was equated with an Englishman. This suggests that the standard was static in nature. However, the second section of the chapter complicates this conclusion by introducing numerous cases and settings in which the standard was adapted to specific, local contexts – sometimes so successfully that local variants of it developed. Drawing together the first two sections, the final part considers the nexus between a standard’s resemblance to the people to whom it is applied and the authority of law.

States’ attempts to translate the messy realities of revolutionary-era coerced mobilities into orderly categories of law were met with efforts to define legal statuses by those forcibly removed. Focusing on revolutionary-era political refugees, the chapter shows how governments’ responses led to a proliferation of so-called alien laws across the Americas and Europe and how, despite their seemingly universal and neutral character, these laws reflected the ambiguous status and multiple mobilities during this period. As can be seen in a major legal battle involving a family of refugees of Haitian origin in Jamaica, the regulation of alien status had long-standing ramifications during a period in which the terms of political membership and state belonging were in full transformation across the Atlantic world. Both in mundane administrative interactions and legal battles, refugees engaged with the law and sought to shape and negotiate their status. In doing so, they could also rely on “vernacular” uses in other relevant branches of the law, such as legal distinctions governing freedom and slavery. As with freedom, belonging was not just granted or asserted by state authorities but could also be claimed and recrafted by those who sought it.

In 1823 and 1824, two newspaper editors, James Silk Buckingham and George Greig, were subjected to extrajudicial banishment after their respective newspapers were deemed dangerous influences on colonial society in Bengal (Buckingham) and the Cape of Good Hope (Greig). There are important resonances in the way in which these two separate episodes attracted controversy over the relationship between the executive and judicial branches of colonial government and the practice of using state-sanctioned banishment against dissenting political voices. They were also taken up in similar ways by British reformers who sought to embarrass conservatives at home by linking political struggles in the metropole with those of the imperial periphery. As a result, the cases raise legal and constitutional questions over personal liberty, state security, and subjecthood that extended far beyond their original colonial contexts.

Taking as starting point the lives of an Irish general and a Cretan naval officer, both involved in the 1820 revolution in Sicily, the chapter explores the ways in which mobility and conflict interacted in the post-Napoleonic period across the Mediterranean, and connected revolution and counter-revolution in North Africa, Sicily, Naples, Spain, Portugal, and the Aegean Sea in the 1820s. These case studies show the overlap between the categories of volunteer and mercenary, imperial agent and freedom fighter, refugee and economic migrant, as well as their fluidity. More generally, they point to the very different ways in which one could become a revolutionary and the plurality of motivations behind such a decision. They suggest that while the Napoleonic Wars were crucial to produce new types of displacement, it is important to consider them also in continuity with longer-term, Early Modern patterns of mobility across the Mediterranean.

Guano imperialism marked the first major commodity rush into the Pacific. Between 1850 and 1900, the United States claimed over a hundred islands across the world through the Guano Act of 1856. Why did the United States develop a guano empire? Most scholarly attention focuses on state-led explanations for guano imperialism, like the influence of American farmers and naval lobbies on Congress. By contrast, this chapter presents evidence that entrepreneurs led the way into the Pacific. A sudden rise in guano prices led US entrepreneurs to search for guano and threats to their interests from foreign competitors led them to search for government protection.

Focusing on the island of Borneo, this chapter explains why Brunei – but not the other administrative units on Borneo – achieved separate independence. Nineteenth-century European expansion into Southeast Asia divided the island of Borneo into four administrative units: Brunei, Sarawak, North Borneo, and Dutch Borneo. The first three, located in the northern part of the island, were under British colonial rule, while the southern half was under Dutch colonial rule. They were highly similar to each other prior to colonization, but their decolonization outcomes diverged; Dutch Borneo became part of Indonesia, and Sarawak and North Borneo became part of Malaysia, while Brunei rejected to be merged into Malaysia in 1963 and eventually became independent separately in 1984. This chapter conducts historical within-case and comparative case studies to show that oil and the protectorate system enabled Brunei’s separate independence, while the lack of these two factors resulted in the incorporation of the other three colonial units into larger entities.

Shifting the focus from Borneo to the Persian Gulf, this chapter explains why Qatar and Bahrain – but not the other administrative units in the lower Gulf – achieved separate independence. Britain had been involved in the Persian Gulf for centuries until its withdrawal in 1971. Through treaties signed by the British and local rulers, there had been nine separate sheikhdoms in the lower Gulf with the same colonial status of a British protected state: Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Bahrain, Dubai, Fujairah, Qatar, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm al-Quwain. They had similar social, cultural, political, and historical backgrounds, but they varied in their decolonization outcomes. All of them participated in negotiations under Abu Dhabi’s initiative between 1968 and 1971 to form a federation. Among the other eight, six eventually joined the newly established United Arab Emirates. The other two, Qatar and Bahrain, however, chose to achieve independence on their own. This chapter analyzes the sheikhdoms in depth using within-case and comparative analyses to reveal that Qatar and Bahrain achieved separate independence because of their early oil development and the protectorate system, while the lack of these two factors resulted in the incorporation of the others into the UAE.

The chapter introduces the book by presenting the puzzle it seeks to explain. During the decolonization process, colonial and regional powers frequently pursued the policy of amalgamation to avoid creating micro-states, which resulted in numerous cases of merger. However, some rejected merger projects and became independent separately. What, then, accounts for their separate existence? More generally, why did some colonial areas achieve independence separately from neighboring regions when facing pressure for amalgamation or annexation, while others became part of a larger state? This chapter then elaborates the main line of argument and the theoretical framework that underpins it. It argues that oil and a specific type of colonial administration carved out producing areas to create a state that would otherwise not exist. The introduction ends by briefly discussing methods and explaining the structure of the book.

This chapter examines how Britain used the Shakespeare Tercentenary to forge and strengthen the ties with its actual and desired allies, analysing a number of British overtures and the target countries’ responses. In these exchanges, Shakespeare was presented as a guarantor of shared cultural and ethical values upon which wartime collaborations could be built. Some countries, however, responded with polite rebuffs or used the occasion to present their own demands. On some occasions, Shakespeare-inspired conversations between allies could stray into controversial areas, as when the Belgian consul Charles Sarolea used his Stratford lecture to remind the British of their moral obligation to keep assisting the Belgian refugees. The most complex cases considered in this chapter are the Tercentenary contributions from Britain’s colonies, among them South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and Ireland. Their tributes often express ambivalent feelings towards the ‘mother country’: simultaneously, a sense of kinship and a desire to forge their own identities in relation to but separate from Britain; an affiliation with Britain and a desire for self-determination. The 1916 Tercentenary provided a platform for addressing a range of controversial issues and contradictory feelings, ranging from imperial pride and loyalty to imperial exploitation and resentment.

This chapter introduces the study, setting, argument, and plan of progression of Bankrolling Empire. In particular, I introduce the Jhaveri family of Ahmedabad and identify how the Mughal state provided new opportunities and challenges for the family by the early seventeenth century. The reader is left with the idea that traditional explanations of Mughal collapse such as bigotry of emperors, superior fighting power of rival warlords, and communal distrust between Muslim rulers and Hindu subjects are not adequate. Instead, I suggest financial crises were the chief cause that tipped Mughal administration beyond recovery. Such transformations in state and locality in Mughal Gujarat are highlighted by focusing on four generations of a remarkable business family, the Jhaveris of Ahmedabad, and their relations with political elites. The Jhaveris were deeply involved in political intrigue, courtly life, and the finances of Mughal officials and their rivals across two centuries.

The interwar decades saw the emergence of central banking institutions in the prosperous white settler ‘dominions’ of Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada. Local political and business interests promoted central banks with a view to fostering domestic economic and financial stability, while the Bank of England and British government imagined a chain of central banks across the empire that would support their policies. Given that financial markets in the dominions were underdeveloped, it was difficult for the new central banks control monetary conditions, mirroring problems in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, the British discovered that they could not impose their ideas on the dominions, especially when local economic concerns conflicted with those of the imperial centre.