To this reader, it is but one more area in which Professor Lord's conclusion is apt: "Suffice it to say,
proconsular leadership, which so plainly offers danger as well as opportunity, is an instrument in need of adult supervision at the imperial center."
So: viceroys and governors were treated with more fawning deference overseas than ever they received at home, where many of them missed the saluting and the curtseying they had taken for granted in their palmy
proconsular days.
The tensions between the plantation and the village, manifesting themselves in different guises in the society in which he grew up, predisposed him early in life to take sides everywhere he settled during his long exile, with `The scorned, the rejected/the men hemmed in with the spears/the men of the tattered battalion/that fights "till it dies"', and not with `The princes and prelates and periwigged charioteers/riding triumphantly laurelled/to lap the fat of the years'[7] What was also inescapable was the exposure to the daily round of petty humiliations to which people of colour were subjected throughout the empire, in order to reinforce British
proconsular fantasies of racial and class superiority.
The procedures, known only to those in the know, were geared to an insulated code which was based on
proconsular tradition more romantic than real, but all the stronger for that.
Seen as a
proconsular spearhead, Shanghailanders might indeed be seen to have demonstrated `sloth and timidity' in their perceived failure to expand British influence in China, but the pattern of British imperialism in China was variegated.
The senior bishop in each province was primate, except in
Proconsular Africa, where Carthage was the metropolis of that porvince and of the whole of Africa.
The author of Luke-Acts clearly wishes to associate the birth of Jesus with Augustus, the mention of whose name in connection with the account of the birth of the true Messiah is evocative of many of the themes of the Imperial Cult.(48) In Asia Minor in the
proconsular decree of 9 BC Augustus' birthday was celebrated as the beginning of the saeculum aureum ([GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ...).
Youe, Robert Thorne Coryndon:
Proconsular imperialism in southern and eastern Africa (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, Ont., 1986), pp.