A New Imperial History
While other histories of the British empire have focused on administration, politics and policy, this collection of essays examines the cultural impact of empire on British and colonial people's sense of self, as well as on their social relations in the eighteenth century. The contributions by leading scholars analyze the ways in which theater, sociability, artistic and literary production, history, slavery and identity were affected by Britain's contacts with America, India, Africa and the South Pacific.
- An original exposition of the main themes of the 'new imperial history' which re-states Britain's role across the globe in the eighteenth century
- Challenges the notion that imperial history was somehow separate from what was going on in Britain itself, stressing the implications for British 'identity'
- Covers a vast geographical and subject range in a series of accessible, path-breaking essays
Reviews & endorsements
" A New Imperial History will appeal not only to scholars in British Imperial history, but also to an interdisciplinary audience. Scholars in other areas, such as women's studies, English and Asian literature, anthropology, and linguistics will find it enlightening as well." History
"...this collection offers several stimulating starting points for further study and especially for comparative work with other imperial and colonial places." - William and Mary Quarterly, Allison Games, Georgetown University
"There is a formulaic quality to the collection: one essay innovatively addressing race, class, and gender is followed by another daringly flouting hidebound convention in an exploratory study of class, gender, and race, and is followed in turn by a chapter fearlessly controverting orthodoxies on gender race, and class." The International History Review J.C.D. Clark, University of Kansas
Product details
August 2004Hardback
9780521810272
404 pages
235 × 160 × 30 mm
0.768kg
12 b/w illus.
Available
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: histories, empires, modernities Kathleen Wilson
- Part I. Empire at Home: Difference, Representation, Experience:
- 1. Women and the fiscal-imperial state in late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries Margaret Hunt
- 2. An 'entertainment of oddities': fashionable sociability and the Pacific in the 1770s Gillian Russell
- 3. The theatre of empire: racial counterfeit, racial realism Felicity A. Nussbaum
- 4. Asians in Britain: negotiations of identity through self-representation Michael H. Fisher
- Part II. Promised Lands: Imperial Aspirations and Practice:
- 5. 'Rescuing the age from a charge of ignorance': gentility, knowledge, and the British exploration of Africa in the later eighteenth century Philip J. Stern
- 6. Liberal government and illiberal trade: the political economy of 'responsible government' in early British India Sudipta Sen
- 7. 'Green and pleasant lands': England and the Holy Land in plebeian millenarian culture, c. 1790–1820 Eitan Bar-Yosef
- 8. Protestant evangelicalism, British imperialism and Crusonian identity Hans Turley
- Part III. Time, Identity, and Atlantic Interculture:
- 9. Time and revolution in African America: temporality and the history of Atlantic slavery Walter Johnson
- 10. The Green Atlantic: radical reciprocities between Ireland and America in the long eighteenth century Kevin Whelan
- 11. Brave Wolfe: the making of a hero Nicholas Rogers
- 12. Ethnicity in the British Atlantic world, 1688–1830 Colin Kidd
- Part IV. Englishness, Gender, and the Arts of Discovery:
- 13. Writing home and crossing cultures: George Bogle in Bengal and Tibet, 1770–1775 Kate Teltscher
- 14. Decoding the nameless: gender, subjectivity, and historical methodologies in reading the archives of colonial India Durba Ghosh
- 15. Ornament and use: Mai and Cook in London Harriet Guest
- Thinking back: gender misrecognition and Polynesian subversions aboard the Cook voyages Kathleen Wilson
- Further reading
- Index.