‘The Internationalism of Islam’: The British Perception of a Muslim Menace, 1840–1951
Abstract This article assesses British perceptions of a Muslim menace to imperial security between 1840–1951. These ideas had a long life. They rarely stood in the first rank of imperial concerns, but sometimes in the second. Over this period, British ideas of an Islamic menace focused first on the political self-consciousness of all Muslims than on subterranean bodies which tried to bind masses and elites for political ends, and moved to nationalist movements with a narrow popular base, and finally to those with a mass base. Between 1915 and 1924, fear of a pan-Islamic menace significantly affected British strategic and imperial policy. These ideas involved the interaction of observation, intelligence, perception, learning, fear, ignorance and uncertainty. Their study illuminates the evolution both of British intelligence and of its ideas about the political self-consciousness of its subjects, and the threat that posed to its rule, particularly about the nature and power of colonial nationalism.
British Responses to Mahdist and Other Unrest in North and West Africa, 1919–1930*
Several aspects of the phenomenon of world unrest after the First World War have been scrutinized in recent years. However, little has been said of its North-African dimension in the context of British imperial interests. Drawing upon a wide range of official and private archival material this article examines the origins and nature of British concerns about conspiracies connected with followers of the Mahdi in Northern Nigeria and the Sudan. It also considers the efforts made to investigate these conspiracies against the wider backdrop of nationalist unrest in Egypt and concerns about Bolshevik intrigues world-wide. The official perception of these conspiracies as well as the various investigations into their source is also considered.
To Devolve or Not To Devolve? Welfare Reform in the States
This article analyzes variation in the degree to which states have responded to the devolution of welfare at the federal level by devolving authority over welfare policy to local government. I find that to the extent that states have devolved authority to lower levels of government, they tend to be states that already had a high degree of involvement of local government in welfare provision. In states without this record of local government involvement, the devolution that has occurred has not generated greater involvement of local government, but rather responsibility has been devolved to regional entities with ties to workforce development and with a substantial degree of business involvement. As states gain increasing authority over a redistributive policy, they may begin to treat it as a subset of a larger developmental policy—workforce development.