Brokering Culture In Britain S Empire And The Historical Novel

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel examines the relationship between the historical sensibilities of nineteenth-century British and American “romancers” and the conceptual frameworks that eighteenth-century imperial interlocutors used to imagine and critique their own experiences of Britain’s diffused, tenuous, and often accidental authority. Salyer argues that this cultural experience, more than what Lukács had in mind when he wrote of a mass historical consciousness after Napoleon, gave rise to the Romantic historiographical approach of writers such as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown and Frederick Marryat. This book traces the conversion of the eighteenth-century imperial speaker into the nineteenth-century “romance” hero through a number of proto-novelistic responses to the problem of Imperial history, including Edmund Burke in the Annual Register and the celebrated court case of James Annesley, among others. The author argues that popular Romantic novels such as Scott’s Waverley and Cooper’s The Pioneers convert the problem of narrating the political geographies of eighteenth-century Empire into a discourse of history, placing the historical realities of negotiating Imperial authority at the heart of a nineteenth-century project that fictionalized the possibilities and limits of political historical agency in the modern nation state.

A compelling history of British imperial culture, showing how it was adopted and subverted by colonial subjects around the world As the British Empire expanded across the globe, it exported more than troops and goods. In every colony, imperial delegates dispersed British cultural forms. Facilitated by the rapid growth of print, photography, film, and radio, imperialists imagined this new global culture would cement the unity of the empire. But this remarkably wide-ranging spread of ideas had unintended and surprising results. In this groundbreaking history, John M. MacKenzie examines the importance of culture in British imperialism. MacKenzie describes how colonized peoples were quick to observe British culture--and adapted elements to their own ends, subverting British expectations and eventually beating them at their own game. As indigenous communities integrated their own cultures with the British imports, the empire itself was increasingly undermined. From the extraordinary spread of cricket and horse racing to statues and ceremonies, MacKenzie presents an engaging imperial history--one with profound implications for global culture in the present day.

The demise of the British Empire in the three decades following the Second World War is a theme that has been well traversed in studies of post-war British politics, economics and foreign relations. Yet there has been strikingly little attention to the question of how these dramatic changes in Britain's relationships with the wider world were reflected in British culture. This volume addresses this central issue, arguing that the social and cultural impact of decolonisation had as significant an effect on the imperial centre as on the colonial periphery. Far from being a matter of indifference or resigned acceptance as is often suggested, the fall of the British Empire came as a profound shock to the British national imagination, and resonated widely in British popular culture.

This pioneering 2006 volume addresses the question of how Britain's empire was lived through everyday practices - in church and chapel, by readers at home, as embodied in sexualities or forms of citizenship, as narrated in histories - from the eighteenth century to the present. Leading historians explore the imperial experience and legacy for those located, physically or imaginatively, 'at home,' from the impact of empire on constructions of womanhood, masculinity and class to its influence in shaping literature, sexuality, visual culture, consumption and history-writing. They assess how people thought imperially, not in the sense of political affiliations for or against empire, but simply assuming it was there, part of the given world that had made them who they were. They also show how empire became a contentious focus of attention at certain moments and in particular ways. This will be essential reading for scholars and students of modern Britain and its empire.

In this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the extraordinary stories of collectors who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Egypt, tracing their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Jasanoff delves beneath the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance to look at the British Empire through the eyes of the people caught up in it. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire enters a world where people lived, loved, mingled, and identified with one another in ways richer and more complex than previous accounts have led us to believe were possible. And as this book demonstrates, traces of that world remain tangible—and topical—today. An innovative, persuasive, and provocative work of history.

The world of finance is again undergoing crisis and transformation. This book provides a new perspective on finance through the prism of popular and formal culture and examines fascination and repulsion toward money, the role of governments and individuals in financial crises and how the Crisis of 2008, like others since 1720, repeat the same patterns of enthusiasm, greed, culpability, revulsion, reform and recovery. The book explores the political and socio-economic factors which determine fallibility and resilience in financial cultures, periods of crisis, transition and recovery based on cyclical rather than linear progression. Examining the roots of financial capitalism, in Europe and the United States and its corollary development in Asia, Russia and emerging markets proves that cultural and psychosocial reactions to financial success, endeavor and calamity transcend specific periods or events. The book allows the reader to discover parallel and intersecting reactions, controversies and resolutions in the cultural history of financial markets and institutions.

"In this researched book, Billie Melman takes us on a voyage of the 'culture of history' which developed in England after the French Revolution. Exploring the production of English pasts, the multiplicity of their representations, and the myriad ways in which the English looked at history, she reveals how during the nineteenth century the most popular, longest-enduring, and most highly commercialized images of the past represented it as dangerous, disorderly, and violent."--BOOK JACKET.