Description
Book SynopsisThe volume builds upon developments in recent years in reconceptualising the British Empire as a system structured around complex, multi-layered networks, which transcended conventionally defined boundaries between metropolitan and colonial space. -- .
Trade Review'This volume brings together some of the most eminent scholars of British imperial history, and provides a thought-provoking showcase for a range of innovative approaches to the cultural history of empire. The essays set new agendas for future research, and offer fascinating insights into the cultural connectedness of a once-British world.'
Simon J. Potter, Reader in Modern History at the University of Bristol
'"Culture" here knows no bounds. It hails politics, the popular, military, capital and the body – not simply to show their interconnections but to track the ways that empire itself both integrated and compartmentalised the terrains it aimed to colonise.'
Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois
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Table of ContentsIntroduction: The cultural construction of the British world – Barry Crosbie and Mark Hampton
1. Naked natives and noble savages: the cultural work of nakedness in imperial Britain – Philippa Levine
2. British radicals in Asia and the persistence of empire c.1820–1950 – C.A. Bayly
3. Sugar wars: the culture of free trade versus the culture of antislavery in Britain and the British Caribbean, 1840–50 – Philip Harling
4. At home in the Ottoman Empire: humanitarianism and the Victorian diplomat – Michelle Tusan
5. A semi-exclusionary empire?: the use of British colonial ideals in Trinidad and Bengal – Martin J. Wiener
6. The curious case of the chabutra-wallahs: Britons and Irish imperial culture in nineteenth-century India – Barry Crosbie
7. Sorting out China: British accounts from pre-opium war Canton – John M. Carroll
8. John Stuart Mill’s other island: the discourse of unbridled capitalism in post-war Hong Kong – Mark Hampton
9. Scrutiny abroad: literary criticism and the colonial public – Christopher Hilliard
10. Mr. Hickey’s pictures: Britons and their collectibles in late eighteenth-century India – Tillman Nechtman
11. Material culture and Sierra Leone’s civilising mission in the nineteenth century – Bronwen Everill
Index
