Books in the Critical Perspectives on Empire series

Could European bodies thrive in the Indies? Would Indians turn into Spaniards if they ate Spanish food? This fascinating history of food, colonisation and race shows that attitudes about food were fundamental to European colonialism and understandings of physical difference in the Age of Discovery.

Examines how Central and South Asian travelers provincialized Britishness between 1750 and 1857 and how, by appropriating metropolitan media, they recalibrated Eurasian ways of behaving and knowing to counter a chauvinistic British imperialism with Indo-Persian masculine gentility.

An account charting the winds of decolonisation as they blew into the oceanic world of the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. Tracey Banivanua Mar examines how Indigenous peoples responded to the overlooked limits of decolonisation in the region, shedding new light on the shaping forces of twentieth-century global history.

Pioneering account of the connections between the politics of imperial repression and the economic structures of European colonies between the two World Wars. Ranging across Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, the book explains why labour control and the containment of uprisings and dissent became central facets of colonial policing.

At last a history of how indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian democracy. Set within the broader context of colonial politics, it shows how Britain's policies influenced the treatment of indigenous Australians and how indigenous people began to engage in their own ways with the new political institutions.

An ambitious new vision of French citizenship from the perspective of Africans and Antilleans living in the colonies and mainland France. Lorelle Semley explores the ways in which these colonial subjects used French democratic ideals to demand rights and redefine the meanings of freedom and 'Frenchness'.

During a major overhaul of British imperial policy following the Napoleonic Wars, an escaped convict reinvented himself as an improbable activist, renowned for his exposes of government misconduct and corruption in the Cape Colony and New South Wales. Charting scandals unleashed by the man known variously as Alexander Loe Kaye and William Edwards, Imperial Underworld offers a radical new account of the legal, constitutional and administrative transformations that unfolded during the British colonial order of the 1820s. In a narrative rife with daring jail breaks, infamous agents provocateurs, and allegations of sexual deviance, Professor Kirsten McKenzie argues that such colourful and salacious aspects of colonial administrations cannot be separated from the real business of political and social change. The book instead highlights the importance of taking gossip, paranoia, factional infighting and political spin seriously to show the extent to which ostensibly marginal figures and events influenced the transformation of the nineteenth-century British Empire.

Investigates the entangled transformations of Russia's Muslim communities from the late eighteenth century through to the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkish sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the transformation of Imperial Russia's oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims.

How did those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century settler empire render colonization compatible with humanitarianism? Avoiding a cynical or celebratory response, this book takes seriously the humane disposition of colonial officials, examining the relationship between humanitarian governance and empire. The story of 'humane' colonial governance connects projects of emancipation, amelioration, conciliation, protection and development in sites ranging from British Honduras through Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, New Zealand and Canada to India. It is seen in the lives of governors like George Arthur and George Grey, whose careers saw the violent and destructive colonization of indigenous peoples at the hands of British emigrants. The story challenges the exclusion of officials' humanitarian sensibilities from colonial history and places the settler colonies within the larger historical context of Western humanitarianism.

An innovative history of the politics and practice of the Caribbean spiritual healing techniques known as obeah. Diana Paton traces how representations of obeah were entangled with key moments in Caribbean history, from eighteenth-century slave rebellions to the formation of new nations after independence.

This is an innovative study of the relationship between the production of strategic geographical, political and ethnographical knowledge and the maintenance of the British empire in Asia. It explores the forms of military intelligence, how men were trained to produce them, and their relationship to other types of imperial knowledge.

This unique history of imperialism, language, and creolization in the largest African diaspora of the Indian Ocean reveals the roles of slavery, travel, Christian missions, and European colonialism in the making of a vernacular literary tradition in the islands of the western Indian Ocean during the age of slavery.

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.

A dramatic history of the British public's confrontation with the iniquities of nineteenth-century colonial rule. James Epstein uses the trial of the first governor of Trinidad for the torture of a freewoman of color to reassess the nature of British colonialism and the ways in which empire troubled the metropolitan imagination.

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 Montano 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.

A new perspective on the nineteenth-century imperial world through one family's history across North America, the Caribbean and United Kingdom. Revealing how these figures demonstrate complicated historical trajectories of empire and nation, Adele Perry illustrates how gender, intimacy, and family were key to making and remaking imperial politics.

Fascinating study of the the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century explorations of the Pacific. Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that underpinned the colonial encounter from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767 through the voyages of Cook and Bligh.

A fascinating account of the formation of French conceptions of Islam in Algeria. George Trumbull places narratives by travellers, bureaucrats, scholars and writers at the heart of the production of colonial knowledge and misconceptions about Islam that determined the imperial cultural politics of Algeria and its interactions with republican France.

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.

Taking a fresh look at anti-slavery debates in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this book uncovers the structure, dynamics and flexibility of transatlantic abolitionism during the Age of Revolution. It reframes the abolition movement as a broad international network of activists across metropolitan centres and remote outposts.

A major new study of the critical place of revolutionary terrorism in the colonial and postcolonial history of modern India. Durba Ghosh charts how the application of the rule of law was abrogated, reshaped, and transformed as the British faced challenges posed by a wave of violent terrorist campaigns.

At last a history that explains how indigenous dispossession and survival underlay and shaped the birth of Australian democracy. The legacy of seizing a continent and alternately destroying and governing its original people shaped how white Australians came to see themselves as independent citizens. It also shows how shifting wider imperial and colonial politics influenced the treatment of indigenous Australians, and how indigenous people began to engage in their own ways with these new political institutions. It is, essentially, a bringing together of two histories that have hitherto been told separately: one concerns the arrival of early democracy in the Australian colonies, as white settlers moved from the shame and restrictions of the penal era to a new and freer society with their own institutions of government; the other is the tragedy of indigenous dispossession and displacement, with its frontier violence, poverty, disease and enforced regimes of mission life.

A transnational history of the activist and intellectual network that connected the Black freedom struggle in the United States to liberation movements across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. This book recasts the postwar history of the United States in the light of global decolonisation and racial capitalism.