Introduction

This collection adopts a broad conception of “conflict” by examining sites of conflict which include, but are not limited to, historical battlefields, contemporary areas of political strife and fictional renderings of imperial conflicts. A re-consideration of imperial conflicts is particularly pertinent in the case of the British Empire, which established an extremely varied and complex world in time and space. In its first phase, the North American colonies performed an important role in establishing the Empire. It then reached its height between the end of the nineteenth century and World War I by means of military domination in India, Southeast Asia and Africa, expanding its influence after 1919 up to the process of de-colonization, which commenced from the middle of the twentieth century. With so many diverse cultures involved and the everchanging legitimate arguments proposed for colonialism, the British Empire created a vast volume of work of the most varied kind, including biographies and auto-biographies, travelogues, periodicals, political and economic essays, anthropological studies, paintings, sculptures, architecture, photography, poetry, stories and novels, all of which transmitted a plurality of voices with heterogeneous values and perspectives about the colonial experience. To understand the contentious nature of imperialism, in addition to exploring the concepts of Empire, colony, colonialism and imperialism, it is important to analyse these individual and collective experiences, including the arguments for the benign “European civilizing mission,” and the denunciation of covert economic interests. Another factor to be examined is the aggressive affirmation of British cultural superiority at the time, and the gradual consciousness-raising as to the value and legitimacy of different cultures conducive to dissonance, doubts and questions about the universality of the dominant culture and its manifestations. A third area of interest is the way in which the hierarchical social values in force inmEngland at the time were transplanted to the colonies, and were subsequently transformed or maintained through political and domestic authority or were caught up in the collision between the attraction and repulsion towards other cultures.