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  3. Critical Perspectives on Empire

Critical Perspectives on Empire is a major series of ambitious, cross-disciplinary works in the emerging field of critical imperial studies. Books in the series will explore the connections, exchanges and mediations at the heart of national and global histories, the contributions of local as well as metropolitan knowledge, and the flows of people, ideas and identities facilitated by colonial contact. To that end, the series will not only offer a space for outstanding scholars working at the intersection of several disciplines to bring to wider attention the impact of their work; it will also take a leading role in reconfiguring contemporary historical and critical knowledge, of the past and of ourselves.'Cambridge University Press's new series, Critical Perspectives on Empire, marks an important development in historical studies of imperialism, colonialism, and postcolonialism.'H-HistGeog

  • Editorial Boards: Catherine Hall, University College London, Mrinalini Sinha, Pennsylvania State University, Kathleen Wilson, State University of New York, Stony Brook, Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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29 results in Critical Perspectives on Empire

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Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution
  • An International History of Anti-slavery, c.1787–1820
  • J. R. Oldfield
  • Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    08 August 2013
  • Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution offers a fresh exploration of anti-slavery debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It challenges traditional perceptions of early anti-slavery activity as an entirely parochial British, European or American affair, and instead reframes the abolition movement as a broad international network of activists across a range of metropolitan centres and remote outposts. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book explores the dynamics of transatlantic abolitionism, along with its structure, mechanisms and business methods, and in doing so, highlights the delicate balance that existed between national and international interests in an age of massive political upheaval throughout the Atlantic world. By setting slave trade debates within a wider international context, Professor Oldfield reveals how popular abolitionism emerged as a political force in the 1780s, and how it adapted itself to the tumultuous events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Violence and Colonial Order
  • Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–1940
  • Martin Thomas
  • Published online:
    05 October 2012
    Print publication:
    20 September 2012
  • This is a pioneering, multi-empire account of the relationship between the politics of imperial repression and the economic structures of European colonies between the two World Wars. Ranging across colonial Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, Martin Thomas explores the structure of local police forces, their involvement in colonial labour control and the containment of uprisings and dissent. His work sheds new light on broader trends in the direction and intent of colonial state repression. It shows that the management of colonial economies, particularly in crisis conditions, took precedence over individual imperial powers' particular methods of rule in determining the forms and functions of colonial police actions. The politics of colonial labour thus became central to police work, with the depression years marking a watershed not only in local economic conditions but also in the breakdown of the European colonial order more generally.

Intimate Strangers
  • Friendship, Exchange and Pacific Encounters
  • Vanessa Smith
  • Published online:
    05 September 2012
    Print publication:
    28 October 2010
  • When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which 'All these people came crying out tayo, which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all asked nails and ear-rings of us.' Reading the archive of early contact in Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook's and Bligh's voyages, to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas. It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly British, explorations of Oceania.

The Body of the Conquistador
  • Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700
  • Rebecca Earle
  • Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    23 April 2012
  • This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World. Settlers wondered whether Europeans could eat New World food, whether Indians could eat European food and what would happen to each if they did. By taking seriously their ideas about food we gain a richer understanding of how settlers understood the physical experience of colonialism and of how they thought about one of the central features of the colonial project. The result is simultaneously a history of food, colonialism and race.

The Imperial Security State
  • British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in Asia
  • James Hevia
  • Published online:
    05 July 2012
    Print publication:
    28 June 2012
  • The Imperial Security State explores an important but under-explored dimension of British imperialism - its information system and the close links between military knowledge and the maintenance of empire. James Hevia's innovative study focuses on route books and military reports produced by the British Indian Army military intelligence between 1880 and 1940. He shows that together these formed a renewable and authoritative archive that was used to train intelligence officers, to inform civilian policy makers and to provide vital information to commanders as they approached the battlefield. The strategic, geographical, political and ethnographical knowledge that was gathered not only framed imperial strategies towards colonized areas to the east but also produced the very object of intervention: Asia itself. Finally, the book addresses the long-term impact of the security regime, revealing how elements of British colonial knowledge have continued to influence contemporary tactics of counterinsurgency in twenty-first-century Iraq and Afghanistan.

Subaltern Lives
  • Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920
  • Clare Anderson
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    05 April 2012
  • Subaltern Lives uses biographical fragments of the lives of convicts, captives, sailors, slaves, indentured labourers and indigenous peoples to build a fascinating new picture of colonial life in the nineteenth-century Indian Ocean. Moving between India, Africa, Mauritius, Burma, Singapore, Ceylon, the Andaman Islands and the Australian colonies, Clare Anderson offers fresh readings of the nature and significance of 'networked' Empire. She reveals the importance of penal transportation for colonial expansion and sheds new light on convict experiences of penal settlements and colonies, as well as the relationship between convictism, punishment and colonial labour regimes. The book also explores the nature of colonial society during this period and embeds subaltern biographies into key events like the abolition of slavery, the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the Indian Revolt of 1857. This is an important new perspective on British colonialism which also opens up new possibilities for the writing of history itself.

Drawing the Global Colour Line
  • White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality
  • Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    24 January 2008
  • In 1900 W. E. B. DuBois prophesied that the colour line would be the key problem of the twentieth-century and he later identified one of its key dynamics: the new religion of whiteness that was sweeping the world. Whereas most historians have confined their studies of race-relations to a national framework, this book studies the transnational circulation of people and ideas, racial knowledge and technologies that under-pinned the construction of self-styled white men's countries from South Africa, to North America and Australasia. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds show how in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century these countries worked in solidarity to exclude those they defined as not-white, actions that provoked a long international struggle for racial equality. Their findings make clear the centrality of struggles around mobility and sovereignty to modern formulations of both race and human rights.

Scandal of Colonial Rule
  • Power and Subversion in the British Atlantic during the Age of Revolution
  • James Epstein
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    22 March 2012
  • In 1806 General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, was brought to trial for the torture of a free mulatto named Louisa Calderon and for overseeing a regime of terror over the island's slave population. James Epstein offers a fascinating account of the unfolding of this colonial drama. He shows the ways in which the trial and its investigation brought empire 'home' and exposed the disjuncture between a national self-image of humane governance and the brutal realities of colonial rule. He uses the trial to open up a range of issues, including colonial violence and norms of justice, the status of the British subject, imperial careering, visions of development after slavery, slave conspiracy and the colonial archive. He reveals how Britain's imperial regime became more authoritarian, hierarchical and militarised but also how unease about abuses of power and of the rights of colonial subjects began to grow.

The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland
  • John Patrick Montaño
  • Published online:
    05 February 2012
    Print publication:
    11 August 2011
  • This book is a major study of the cultural foundations of the Tudor plantations in Ireland and of early English imperialism more generally. John Patrick Montaño traces the roots of colonialism in the key relationship of cultivation and civility in Tudor England and shows the central role this played in Tudor strategies for settling, civilising and colonising Ireland. The book ranges from the role of cartography, surveying and material culture - houses, fences, fields, roads and bridges - in manifesting the new order to the place of diet, leisure, language and hairstyles in establishing cultural differences as a site of conflict between the Irish and the imperialising state and as a justification for the civilising process. It shows that the ideologies and strategies of colonisation which would later be applied in the New World were already apparent in the practices, material culture and hardening attitude towards barbarous customs of the Tudor regime.

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