Andrew S. Thompson

Since 9/11 and the onset of the "war on terror," the principal challenge confronting liberal democracies has been to balance freedom with security and individual with collective rights. This book sheds new light on the evolution of human rights norms in liberal democracies by charting the activism of four Canadian NGOs on issues of refugee rights, hate speech, and the death penalty, including their use of difficult, often controversial legal cases as platforms to assert human rights principles and shape judicial policy-making. The struggles of these NGOs reveal not only the fragility but also the resilience of ideas about rights in liberal democracies.

NGOs and Human Rights in Canada

In Defence of Principles

Kent Fedorowich

The essays in this volume have been written by leading experts in their respective fields and bring together established scholars with a new generation of migration and transnational historians. Their work weaves together the ‘new’ imperial and the ‘new’ migration histories, and is essential reading for scholars and students interested in the interplay of migration within and between the local, regional, imperial, and transnational arenas. Furthermore, these essays set an important analytical benchmark for more integrated and comparative analyses of the range of migratory processes – free and coerced – which together impacted on the dynamics of power, forms of cultural circulation and making of ethnicities across a British imperial world.

Empire, migration and identity in the British World

This new study considers the impact of the empire upon modern British political culture. The economic and cultural legacy of empire have received a great deal of attention, but historians have neglected the effects of empire upon the domestic British political scene. Dr Thompson explores economic, demographic, intellectual and military influences and he shows how parliamentary and party opinion interacted with imperial ideas and interests in the country at large. This is a major new book which explores the ideology of key imperial campaigns, and their popular support. It makes a critical contribution to recent debates -- about the importance of empire to the nature and development of British national identities before and after the First World War.

The Empire in British Politics, c. 1880-1932

Imperial Britain

Gary B. Magee

Focusing on the great population movement of British emigrants before 1914, this book provides a perspective on the relationship between empire and globalisation. It shows how distinct structures of economic opportunity developed around the people who settled across a wider British World through the co-ethnic networks they created. Yet these networks could also limit and distort economic growth. The powerful appeal of ethnic identification often made trade and investment with racial 'outsiders' less appealing, thereby skewing economic activities toward communities perceived to be 'British'. By highlighting the importance of these networks to migration, finance and trade, this book contributes to debates about globalisation in the past and present. It reveals how the networks upon which the era of modern globalisation was built quickly turned in on themselves after 1918, converting racial, ethnic and class tensions into protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia. Avoiding such an outcome is a challenge faced today.

Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c.1850–1914

Empire and Globalisation

`The Empire Strikes Back' will inject the empire back into the domestic history of modern Britain. In the nineteenth century and for much of the twentieth century, Britain's empire was so large that it was truly the global superpower. Much of Africa, Asia and America had been subsumed. Britannia's tentacles had stretched both wide and deep. Culture, Religion, Health, Sexuality, Law and Order were all impacted in the dominated countries. `The Empire Strikes Back' shows how the dependent states were subsumed and then hit back, affecting in turn England itself.

Andrew S. Thompson

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