Making Empire
Colonial Encounters and the Creation of Imperial Rule in Nineteenth-Century Africa

This book is the dramatic story of the colonial encounter and the construction of empire in Southern Africa in the nineteenth century.

Richard Price (Author)

9780521889681, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 October 2008

416 pages, 17 b/w illus. 5 maps
23.5 x 15.5 x 2.7 cm, 0.79 kg

'… masterful, and contributes significantly to our understanding of the building of empire and imperial culture at its edges, and of the people inexorably caught up in the process …' Journal of African History

This is the dramatic story of the colonial encounter and the construction of empire in Southern Africa in the nineteenth century. What did the British make of the Xhosa and how did they make sense of their politics and culture? How did the British establish and then explain their dominion, especially when it ran counter to the cultural values they believed themselves to represent? In this book, Richard Price answers these questions by looking at the ways in which individual missionaries, officials and politicians interacted with the Xhosa. He describes how those encounters changed and shaped the culture of imperial rule in Southern Africa. He charts how an imperial regime developed both in the minds of the colonizers and in the everyday practice of power and how the British imperial presence was entangled in and shaped by the encounter with the Xhosa from the very moment of their first meeting.

Preface: intentions and purposes
1. Encounters in empire
2. The making of missionary culture
3. Observation, engagement and optimism
4. Cultural encounters: the destabilization of missionary culture
5. Missionaries encounter the Chiefs
6. The closing of the missionary mind
7. Creating colonial knowledge
8. Meetings, ceremonies and display
9. Empire as democracy
10. Empire and liberalism
11. The destruction of the Xhosa Chiefs
12. The trials of the Chiefs
13. Postscript: endings and beginnings.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], African history [HBJH], General & world history [HBG]