The Afterlife Of Empire

This book investigates how decolonization transformed British society in the 1950s and 1960s, and examines the relationship between the postwar and the postimperial.

In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, his famous novel about a future in which humans are produced to spec in laboratories. Around the same time, Australian legislators announced an ambitious experiment to “breed the colour” out of Australia by procuring white husbands for women of white and indigenous descent. In this study, Nadine Attewell reflects on an assumption central to these and other policy initiatives and cultural texts from twentieth-century Britain, Australia, and New Zealand: that the fortunes of the nation depend on controlling the reproductive choices of citizen-subjects. Better Britons charts an innovative approach to the politics of reproduction by reading an array of works and discourses – from canonical modernist novels and speculative fictions to government memoranda and public debates – that reflect on the significance of reproductive behaviours for civic, national, and racial identities. Bringing insights from feminist and queer theory into dialogue with work in indigenous studies, Attewell sheds new light on changing conceptions of British and settler identity during the era of decolonization.

This book offers a new perspective on the evolution of cities across the Roman Empire in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy at the end of World War I ushered in a period of radical change for East-Central European political structures and national identities. Yet this transformed landscape inevitably still bore the traces of its imperial past. Breaking with traditional histories that take 1918 as a strict line of demarcation, this collection focuses on the complexities that attended the transition from the Habsburg Empire to its successor states. In so doing, it produces new and more nuanced insights into the persistence and effectiveness of imperial institutions, as well as the sources of instability in the newly formed nation-states.

This Handbook traces the history of the changing notion of what it means to die and examines the many constructions of afterlife in literature, text, ritual, and material culture throughout time. The Routledge Handbook of Death and the Afterlife is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising twenty-nine chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into three parts and covers the following important themes: The study of dying, death, and grief Disposal of the dead: past, present, and future Representations of death: narratives and rhetoric Youth meets death: a juxtaposition Questionable deaths and afterlives: suicide, ghosts, and avatars Material corpses and imagined afterlives around the world Within these sections, central issues, debates, and problems are examined, including: the world of death and dying from various cultural viewpoints and timeframes, cultural and social constructions of the definition of death, disposal practices, and views of the afterlife. The Routledge Handbook of Death and the Afterlife is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology.

A definitive history of child emigration across the British Empire from the 1860s to its decline in the 1960s.

This is one of the volumes in the series of 'Afterlives' of the Classics, which is being produced jointly by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute.

This volume examines the significant role population science played in British colonial policy in the twentieth century as the imperial state attempted to control colonial populations using new agricultural and public health policies, private family planning initiatives, and by imposing limits over migration and settlement. A Problem of Great Importance traces British imperial efforts to engage metropolitan activists who could improve its knowledge of colonial demography and design programs to influence colonial population trends. While imperial population control failed to achieve its goals, British institutions and experts would be central to the development of postcolonial population programs. Researchers, scholars, and historians of British history will gain greater perspective into the effects of demography on imperial governance and colonial and postcolonial British views of their place in the world.