Strolling Players of Empire
Theater and Performances of Power in the British Imperial Provinces, 1656–1833

Explores the politics of theatrical and social performance in the establishment of eighteenth-century British imperial rule.

Kathleen Wilson (Author)

9781108479783, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 December 2022

496 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 3.1 cm, 0.87 kg

'Revealing for the first time the full scope of the globe-circling ambition of the English-speaking colonial theater, Kathleen Wilson also re-writes the history of the British Empire in the eighteenth century. Her stunning thesis is that theatrical and related kinds of public enactments did not merely reflect the expanding imperium but rather created it by enabling the performance of Englishness by people of all nations. Sustaining its bold claims by making both new archival discoveries and original arguments, Strolling Players of Empire raises the stakes for what research in the field will be for decades to come.' Joseph Roach, author of Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance

Why did Britons get up a play wherever they went? Kathleen Wilson reveals how the performance of English theater and a theatricalized way of viewing the world shaped the geopolitics and culture of empire in the long eighteenth century. Ranging across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans to encompass Kingston, Calcutta, Fort Marlborough, St. Helena and Port Jackson as well as London and provincial towns, she shows how Britons on the move transformed peripheries into historical stages where alternative collectivities were enacted, imagined and lived. Men and women of various ethnicities, classes and legal statuses produced and performed English theater in the world, helping to consolidate a national and imperial culture. The theater of empire also enabled non-British people to adapt or interpret English cultural traditions through their own performances, as Englishness also became a production of non-English peoples across the globe.

Prologue: Strollers without Borders
Introduction: Britain's Theatrical Empire
Part I. Playing: 1. Peripheralizing the Spheres: Theatrical Assemblages of the Imperial Provinces
2. Rowe's Fair Penitent as Global History: Colonial Family Strategies and the Imperatives of Nation
3. The Lure of the Other: Jews, Nabobs and Enslaved Africans in a Transcolonial Imaginary
Part II. Theatres of Empire: 4. Performances of Freedom: Jamaican Maroons in Imperial Transit
5. Blackface Empire: or, the Slavery Meridian
6. Zanga's Colony: Revenge in Sydney
Part III. East India Company Peripheries and the History of Modernity
7. Performing The Wonder in Sumatra: Theatrical Ethnography in a New World History
8. In Conclusion: Napoleonic Gothic, or St. Helena as Center of the British World.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1], General & world history [HBG]