A New Imperial History
Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840

Collection of essays introducing the 'new imperial history' as it developed in the eighteenth century.

Kathleen Wilson (Edited by)

9780521810272, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 June 2004

404 pages, 12 b/w illus.
23.5 x 16 x 3 cm, 0.768 kg

"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

This pioneering collection of essays charts an exciting new field in British studies, 'the new imperial history'. Leading scholars from history, literature and cultural studies tackle problems of identity, modernity and difference in eighteenth-century Britain and the empire. They examine, from interdisciplinary perspectives, the reciprocal influences of empire and culture, the movements of peoples, practices and ideas effected by slavery, diaspora and British dominance, and ways in which subaltern, non-western and non-elite people shaped British power and knowledge. The essays move through Britain, America, India, Africa and the South Pacific in testament to the networks of people, commodities and entangled pasts forged by Britain's imperial adventures. Based on ground-breaking research, these analyses of the imperial dimensions of British culture and identities in global contexts will challenge the notion that empire was something that happened 'out there', and they demonstrate its long-lasting implications for British identity and everyday life.

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.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Cultural studies [JFC], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], British & Irish history [HBJD1], General & world history [HBG], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]