Blog Posts and Articles
Follow the Special Collections blog, category: Royal Commonwealth Society
- Unpublished manuscripts of Kenyan journalist Henry Muoria (blogpost 1 April 2022)
- Polar exploration (blogpost: 23 February 2022) and Polar archives (collection links)
- Pamphlets of 19th-century New Zealand (blogpost: 1 July 2021)
- Pamphlets of nineteenth-century China (blogpost: 13 April 2021)
- Pamphlets of late nineteenth-century British Colonial Africa (blogpost: 5 February 2021)
- Pamphlets of nineteenth-century India (blogpost: 1 December 2020)
- Nineteenth-century Australian pamphlets (blogpost: 12 Oct 2020)
- VJ Day, Singapore, 1945 (blogpost: 13 August 2020)
- Nineteenth-century Canadian pamphlets (blogpost: 30 July 2020)
- Cape Town Anti-Convict Petition, 1849 (blogpost: 30 June 2020)
- Rare Caribbean pamphlets and photographs (blog post: 29 April 2020)
- Queensland, Australia - collections go online! (blog post: 14 February 2020)
- Addition to the Donald Bowen archive (blog post: 21 January 2020)
- Queen Mary’s South Asian tour scrapbooks, 1905-1906 (blog post: 6 December 2019)
- Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition (blog post: 28 November 2019)
- More Royal Commonwealth Society curious objects! (blog post: 5 November 2019)
- Tea merchants coming ashore (blog post: 25 October 2019)
- The Falkland Islands and South Georgia (blog post: 10 September 2019)
- Turkish Cypriot political poster (blog post: 27 August 2019)
- Commonwealth universities (blog post: 17 July 2019
- Tales of India written for my grandchildren by Herbert Stewart Ross (1885-1963). (blog post: 19 June 2019)
- New Royal Commonwealth Society acquisitions! (blog post: 6 June 2019) - a palm leaf manuscript presented to Gladys Croft upon her retirement as Principal of Vincent Girls’ High School, Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, in 1948 (RCMS 402) and a ‘Souvenir of India’ - an ‘accordion fold’ photograph album from the 1870s (Y3022ZZZZ).
- Caribbean photographs (blog post: 8 May 2019) re. release of some fascinating RCS images on Cambridge Digital Library
- Shanghai and the May 30th Movement: guest post by Elena Fulgheri (11 March 2019) about some glass lantern slides of Chinese political cartoons dated December 1925.
- Completion of Royal Commonwealth Society glass plate project (blog post: 2 April 2019)
- Glass plates of Oceania, South Asia, the Far East and Africa (blog post: 18 Feb. 2019)
- Watercolours of 19th-century Australia, Canada, Gibraltar, Mauritius and the Channel Islands (blog post: 5 Feb. 2019)
- Celebrating 150 years of collecting (by Benjamin Hodge; RCS Newsletter, November 2018)
- Celebrating 150 years of the Royal Commonwealth Society (UL news feature: 19 October 2018)
- Treasures from the Royal Commonwealth Society: A new online exhibition offers extraordinary insights into the Commonwealth and Britain's former colonial territories (feature by Tom Almeroth-Williams: 18 October 2018)
- Virtual exhibition: Royal Commonwealth Society’s 150th anniversary (blog post: 18 October 2018)
- Missionary journey to Uganda in 1900 (blog post: 6 August 2018)
- Australian birds (blog post: 5 July 2018)
- Digitisation of Sukkur Bridge photograph album (blog post: 8 June 2018)
- Teaching Geography through Illustrated Lectures and Textbooks (blog post by Sabrina Meneghini: 12 April 2018)
- Most extensive Royal Commonwealth Society photograph release yet (blog post: 9 March 2018)
- Incredible images of colonial India have been digitised for the first time (article by Maria Thomas in Quartz India, 8 March 2018)
- Alfred Hugh Fisher Photographic Collection (guest post by Sabrina Meneghini: 19 January 2018)
- Sacred, life-affirming and fast disappearing: waters of the Himalayas – in pictures (article by Professor Bhaskar Vira and Eszter Kovacs, photography by Toby Smith, and archival images from RCS and CSAS collections, The Guardian: 27 December 2017). Rapid urbanisation, dwindling groundwater reserves and changing rain patterns are driving a water crisis in the lower Himalayas of India and Nepal. Photojournalist Toby Smith took part in a research project charting the shifting demands on this fragile landscape.
- Photographs of India (19 December 2017)
- New Royal Commonwealth Society Glass Negatives and Lantern Slides (12 December 2017)
- Voices of civilian internment: Salvation Army archives on Cambridge Digital Library (blog post by Salvation Army archivist, Ruth Macdonald, November 2017)
- Royal Commonwealth Society glass negatives and lantern slides (23 October 2017)
- ‘The Tweed’ in Colombo Harbour, 1888 (2 October 2017)
- Launch of online archive: Voices of civilian internment: WWII Singapore (11 August 2017)
- Farewell to Changi (blog post: 30 June 2017)
- Newly-identified Cypriot letter (guest post by Vasiliki Vartholomaiou: 26 June 2017)
- Early tea cultivation in India and Sri Lanka (blog post: 16 June 2017)
- Construction of Lansdowne Bridge, Sukkur, 1885-1889 (blog post: 3 May 2017)
- South African War photographs, 1901-02 (blog post: 28 March 2017)
- Egypt on a tourist’s mind (guest post by Jasmin Daam, University of Kassel: 7 March 2017)
- Changi archives Entrance Hall exhibition (blog post: 21 February 2017)
- Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition: write around the world (blog post: 13 January 2017)
- Under the Microscope – Preliminary Investigations of the Changi Archive Conservation Research Project (blog post by Emma Nichols: 14 December 2016)
- Asante Goldweights (blog post: 1 December 2016)
- A letter of gratitude - Nigerian school magazines, 1950s (blog post by Agnieszka Drabek-Prime: 17 November 2016)
- Donald Bowen – Curator of the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery (blog post by Nikki Petroni, PhD candidate, University of Malta:19 September 2016)
- Letters from Civil War America (blog post 18 August 2016)
- History and Conservation of the John Weekley Changi Archives (blog post: 11 July 2016)
- Conservator, Emma Nichols, awarded Wellcome Trust Research Bursary (Library news: 27 June 2016)
- Sir Harold Smedley Collection [Commonwealth diplomat] (blog post: 7 June 2016)
- Glimpses of early Siam and Burma [Thailand and Myanmar] (blog post: 6 April 2016)
- 'These tremendous years' - photographs of British Columbia by John Howard Arthur Chapman (blog post: 18 January 2016)
- Christmas in Changi 1942 - stories from the camp newspapers (blog post: 22 December 2015)
- Conservation challenges posed by the WWII civilian internment camp archives (blog post: 16 November 2015)
- Changi civilian internment digitisation project - an introduction to the project to conserve and digitise unique WWII records (blog post: 3 November 2015)
- ‘World’s loneliest white man’ - planter William French (28 August 2015)
- Cambridge Digital Library – latest update (24 July 2015)
- Victorian Celebrities: photographic portraits (blog post: 14 July 2015)
- Cambridge Digital Library – July update (3 July 2015)
- Panoramas and watercolours among first items added to new Royal Commonwealth Society collection on Cambridge Digital Library (Cambridge University Library News: 1 July 2015)
- Photography in the Portuguese colonies, 1860-1960 (Sonia Morcillo, European languages across borders blog: 30 June 2015)
- Cambridge Digital Library – June update (3 June 2015)
- British Malaya in the 1930s: the archives of railway engineer Hugh Murton Le Fleming (blog post: 20 May 2015)
- Conservation of Indian miniatures (blog post: 24 April 2015)
- Tea and coffee in India and Ceylon (blog post: 22 January 2015)
- Colonial Postal History (blog post: 7 January 2015)
- Sir George Arthur and British Honduras (blog post: 10 December 2014)
- Ghana: Health and Nursing (blog post by Francesca Issatt: 10 November 2014)
- Ghana: Our Days on the Gold Coast (blog post by Francesca Issatt: 5 November 2014)
- Archives of John Seymour Benson (blog post: 31 October 2014)
- Tracking down items in Afrikaans (Joanne Koehler, European languages across borders blog post, 14 October 2014)
- Ghana, a photographic history: images of Achimota College (blog post by Francesca Issatt: 13 October 2014)
- Donald Bowen Collection: artist and Curator of the Commonwealth Institute’s Art Gallery (blog post: 15 July 2014)
- Dobinson Collection, East African photographs and archives of Henry and Phyllis Dobinson (blog post: 5 June 2014)
- Claude Sitwell Collection (blog post: 28 April 2014)
- The Papers of Sir John Glover (blog post: 3 March 2014)
- Sir Frederick Tymms, the flying civil servant (SAALG blog post: 15 February 2014)
- Royal Colonial Institute Photographic Portraits (blog post: 3 January 2014)
- ‘… superb photographs of very great interest’: an album of New Guinea views in the RCS collection (blog post by Antje Lüb)
- The Royal Commonwealth Society Library and the Blitz (blog post: 12 July 2013)
- Photos from Zimbabwe (blog post: 15 March 2013)
- Historian’s thoughts turn to Gold: a guest post by Owain Richards (blog post: 14 November 2012)
- The eruption of Mont Pelée, 1902 (blog post: 17 October 2012)
- Royal Tour of the Commonwealth 1953-54 (blog post: 1 June 2012)
- Royal West African Frontier Force (blog post: 31 January 2012)
- A challenge to amateur spies: the Hugh Childers papers (2 blog posts: 21 September and 4 November 2011)
- The Royal Commonwealth Society Essay Competition archive (blog post: 7 October 2011)
- Historic Hong Kong (blog post on the conservation of historic photographic panoramas, 12 July 2011)
- ‘A sapper’s letters to his mother’ (2 blog posts: 26 May and 20 June 2011)
- In the spotlight: Marshall Islands Sailing Charts (October 2010)
- The Colonial Blue Books: a major resource in the Royal Commonwealth Society Library (Bulletin, Friends of Cambridge University Library, No. 26-27, 2006-2007)
- Unlocking the RCS archives (article about, from Readers' Newsletter, no. 34, October 2006)
- What you didn't expect to find in the Royal Commonwealth Society Collections in Cambridge University Library (CULIB, issue 56, Lent 2005)
- Archives Cataloguing Project (article about, from Reader's Newsletter, October 2002)
Exhibitions
- Celebrating 150 years of the Royal Commonwealth Society (1868-2018) with a new collection on Cambridge Digital Library
- Treasures from the Royal Commonwealth Society: A new online exhibition offers extraordinary insights into the Commonwealth and Britain's former colonial territories (Feature on our RCS 150 Exhibition by Tom Almeroth-Williams,18 October 2018)
- Pani, Pahar : a collaborative project exploring the changing landscapes and escalating water crises of the Indian Himalayas. Led by Professor Bhaskar Vira and Dr Eszter Kovacs at the Department of Geography (with collaborators in India and Nepal), and photojournalist Toby Smith with curated archival photographs from the Royal Commonwealth Society collection and from the Centre of South Asian Studies. Physical exhibition at Divinity School, 17-28 October 2017 as part of Festival of Ideas. Online exhibition accessible here.
- Curious Objects exhibition includes a case devoted to objects from the Commonwealth (scroll down to view these), plus a pocket globe (do view this in 3D - link at bottom of caption) and a warri-board from the RCS collection. Do come and view the curious objects in the Milstein Exhibition Centre in Cambridge University Library before the 21st March 2017. Free entry.
- You can also take a spin around the Commonwealth via the 3D globe . Select a number and view an item from our Curious Objects Exhibition.
- RCS collections in Cambridge Digital Library
- Audio description of Marshall Islands sailing chart, Micronesia (from Science Museum 'Who am I?' exhibition, October 2010-)
- Commonwealth cultures in a decolonising world (April 2010-)
- Products of the Empire - Cinchona: a short history (October 2009-)
- Royal Commonwealth Society Slide Show (27 May 2008-)
- Archived copy of our slavery exhibition 22 June-31 July 2017, archived as part of Antislavery Usable Past web-resource. More information on this project is available on their project blog.
- Slavery, shackles and sugar: the route to freedom? (22 June-31 July 2007)
- Opium: a "morally indefensible trade in a "horrible drug" (2-31 July 2007)