Description
Book SynopsisBased on close textual attention and rare archival material, and drawing on ideas from material culture, fashion theory, economic criticism, and fetishism,
Empire of Diamonds interprets the various meanings of diamonds.
Trade Review“
Empire of Diamonds offers a sweeping, vivid, richly detailed, at times dazzling account of the diamond as a figure for empire in nineteenth-century British writing. Munich’s book is more than a sequence of sparkling interpretive rhapsodies: it has a genuine argument to make about the imaginary life of the Victorian empire.
The imperishable beauty of diamonds, so this gorgeous book argues, was a vector for imperial rapaciousness from Britain to India to South Africa; diamonds’ distracting glamor could never quite conceal the exploitation, violence, racial animosity, and death that have always accompanied their unearthing and circulation. Stylishly written, deeply learned, and richly interdisciplinary, this book provides the necessary settings (historical, geopolitical, economic, cultural, religious, and psychoanalytic) to illuminate every facet of the most fabulous and gruesome of diamond tales, from Victorian times to the present.”
