ABSTRACT
Rather than assuming that the politics and agendas of these [imperial] projects and the attitudes of Britons towards them are self-evident, it is necessary instead to examine the specificities of the national and colonial communities in which imperial power and its refusal was negotiated and lived through, ... Within imperial and colonial settings, colonial intentions, both formal and informal, were incompletely and ambiguously realized; historical actors were defined in multiple ways; and different genders, classes, ethnicities and races all participated, albeit in varied and unequal measure, in the creation of their history. The movement of peoples and goods, the clash of cultures and experience and the imperial contexts of everyday life forged the many links that connected men and women living on both sides of the Atlantic and across the Indian and Pacific oceans. 1
