The British Empire According to Players Cigarettes

The following series of 50 cigarette cards produced by the Imperial Tobacco Co. of Great Britain for Players Cigarettes purports to show interesting scenes from across the vast expanse of the British Empire. It is a fascinating glimpse not only into the cultures that made up the empire upon which the sun never set, but also into how British imperialism was celebrated. 

In modern times is difficult to understand, and rightly so, the mindset in which imperialism was considered a source of pride rather than shame. People in the west today often shy away from words denoting any kind of excess of nationalism or patriotism, perceiving them as racist affronts to multicultural values, let alone holding a belief that for their culture to dominate and exploit others was a manifestly good thing. Yet empires from Babylon to Rome to Britain have arguably been history's dominant vehicle of cross-cultural exchange. The movement of goods and peoples across a unified political body exposed the average person in them to a variety of cultures, foods, religions, arts, and ways of life. This is not to excuse or deny the horrors of imperialist regimes, but simply to recognize that empires are complicated entities. 

There is a more interesting question implicit to the sort of exercise in imperialism that these cards represent. It would be easy to dismiss them as artefacts of a disgusting episode in recent human history... It is more challenging to ask of the extent to which modern ideas of multiculturalism are themselves a colonialist, imperialist project.

These cards are from the amazing Digital Collections of the New York Public Library. Click on a card for a larger view.

Sultana's Dream, a Muslim feminist utopia

It is not without truth, or reason, that Science Fiction has traditionally been a Western-dominated and male-dominated genre. Scientific Romances grew out of the intersection between scientific investigation, technological invention, and colonial exploitation, as the most educated classes in Western society attempted to grapple with the challenges and opportunities of the Industrial Revolution. Voices of the colonized and those with less opportunity tended to be more marginal.

Many of these cultures were not experiencing the full brunt of the Industrial Revolution as such. For example, Canada does not have an especially strong tradition of Scientific Romances because it was, for most of the country through most of the 19th century, a wilderness colonial hinterland sparsely populated with farmers, trappers, and indigenous peoples. The colonized were also less likely to be writing, especially in English, especially in a genre that required a reasonable amount of technological, scientific, and cultural knowledge. An average indigenous person in a colonized nation would be unlikely, through no fault of their own, to have the same resources and opportunities available to them as a Jules Verne would, who could access information about the entire world through the library in Amiens.      

But some people are not average. The short story Sultana's Dream has a unique place in the canon of the genre, as a Scientific Romance written by a Bengali Muslim woman. Published in 1905, feminist and social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain used the medium of Scientific Romance to postulate a reversal of fortune for women in her society, turning the tables on the men and hypothesizing a female-run utopia.