Chapter 2 explains the historical setting during the period of colonization and decolonization and develops the theoretical framework of this book. The successful cases of separate independence covered in this book are cases where oil production started at a specific time: after colonization but well before the “window of sovereignty” closed. When this economic activity occurred in protectorates where the colonizers offered protection to the local rulers and ruled through them, the result was separate independence. The central argument of this book, therefore, is that when faced with a project for amalgamation with neighboring areas, (1) oil production during the colonial period and (2) the protectorate system led to separate independence. The two factors enabled some colonial entities to achieve statehood separately by providing them with material and political incentives to pursue separate independence, perceived viability as a sovereign state, which includes both financial self-sufficiency and security, and bargaining power vis-à-vis the colonizers.

This chapter focuses on the pairing of popular fiction and imperialism. It takes as a starting point the historical coincidence of the rise of new forms of popular fiction with the intensification of colonialism in Britain during the New Imperialism (roughly from the 1870s to 1914). Examining titles including H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and numerous others, the discussion treats Victorian popular fiction as both a site where colonialist ideology exerts its power and a site where ambivalences, vagaries and paradoxes speak of a struggle to make sense of imperial rationales. Examining how popular fiction represents history and the individual, landscape and temporality, threat and assimilation and the supposed adaptability of Englishness reveals some of the rhetorical and ideological contortions that rendered British imperialism thinkable to its own prosecutors.

The peak of high-imperialism brought with it a resurgence of commemoration aimed at the events of 1857. Portraying the mutiny as a victory won by archetypal Victorian soldier heroes, these new forms of commemoration witnessed in the 1890s and early 1900s are best understood as attempts to embolden the colonial community at a time when the rise of Indian nationalism seemed to make a 'Second Mutiny' more likely than ever before. Lionising the imperial heroes who had 'Saved India' in her time of greatest need, commemoration was designed to reassure the British whilst simultaneously inducing them to be ready to emulate the glorious deeds of a past generation. As is explored in this chapter, however, colonial sites of memory remained deeply ambivalent for the visitors who experienced them. When attention is paid to the travelogues and diaries written by British tourists who travelled to these sites during the ‘high noon’ of empire, it becomes apparent that the excessive triumphalism of commemoration over this period was in reality only ever superficial and belied deep-seated anxieties concerning the threat of further insurrection in the mould of the mutiny.

Chapter 3 examines how transatlantic fiction about dinosaurs shaped notions of national potency at a key moment in US and British history. The first half focuses on two American interstellar romances whose violent protagonists vanquish dinosaurs on evolutionarily backward planets. J. J. Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) has them conquering Jupiter’s dinosaurs before heading to a Christianised Saturn and learning about the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race’s spiritual evolution, while in Gustavus Pope’s Journey to Venus (1895) they subdue prehistoric Venus in an unruly pastiche of palaeontological writing. The chapter’s second half provides alternative perspectives from British authors whose narratives, all published in 1899, allude to the ongoing search for giant dinosaurs in the American West as a way of reflecting on nation, empire, and masculinity. Henry Hering’s short story ‘Silas P. Cornu’s Divining-Rod’ ridicules the avarice of the US tycoons who fuelled the dinosaur ‘rush’, while C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent and Frank Savile’s Beyond the Great South Wall have encounters with giant brontosaurs reinvigorating men’s imperialistic masculinity in over-civilised societies.