In this engaging new study, John D. Wong examines the Canton trade networks that helped to shape the modern world through the lens of the prominent Chinese merchant Houqua, whose trading network and financial connections stretched from China to India, America and Britain. In contrast to interpretations that see Chinese merchants in this era as victims of rising Western mercantilism and oppressive Chinese traditions, Houqua maintained a complex balance between his commercial interests and those of his Western counterparts, all in an era of transnationalism before the imposition of the Western world order. The success of Houqua and Co. in configuring its networks in the fluid context of the early nineteenth century remains instructive today, as the contemporary balance of political power renders the imposition of a West-centric world system increasingly problematic, and requires international traders to adapt to a new world order in which China, once again, occupies center stage.

In this original and widely researched book, Billie Melman explores the culture of history during the age of modernity. Her book is about the production of English pasts, the multiplicity of their representations and the myriad ways in which the English looked at history (sometimes in the most literal sense of 'looking') and made use of it in a social and material urban world, and in their imagination. Covering the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the Coronation of 1953, Melman recoups the work of antiquarians, historians, novelists and publishers, wax modellers, cartoonists and illustrators, painters, playwrights and actors, reformers and educationalists, film stars and their fans, musicians and composers, opera-fans, and radio listeners. Avoiding a separation between 'high' and 'low' culture, Melman analyses nineteenth-century plebeian culture and twentieth-century mass-culture and their venues - like Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, panoramas, national monuments like the Tower of London, and films - as well as studying forms of 'minority' art - notably opera. She demonstrates how history was produced and how it circulated from texts, visual images, and sounds, to people and places and back to a variety of texts and images. While paying attention to individuals' making-do with culture, Melman considers constrictions of class, gender, the state, and the market-place on the consumption of history. Focusing on two privileged pasts, the Tudor monarchy and the French Revolution, the latter seen as an English event and as the framework for narrating and comprehending history, Melman shows that during the nineteenth century, the most popular, longest-enduring, and most highly commercialized images of the past represented it not as cosy and secure, but rather as dangerous, disorderly, and violent. The past was also imagined as an urban place, rather than as rural. In Melman's account, City not green Country, is the centre of a popular version of the past whose central Images are the dungeon, the gallows, and the guillotine.

A “meticulously researched and deftly written biography” of the woman behind the famed wax museums, and their origins in the era of the French Revolution (Midwest Book Review). Madame Marie Tussaud is known worldwide for the chain of wax museums she started over two hundred years ago. Less known is that her original wax models were often of the famous and infamous people she personally knew during and after the French Revolution. These were people like Voltaire, Robespierre, and Napoleon—people who changed the world. Even more, the wax figures were depicted in scenes drawn from the horrors she experienced during the reign of terror in Paris during her early adult years. This book shows how the traumatic and cataclysmic experiences of Madame Tussaud’s early life became part of her legacy. She created a succession of scenes in wax, telling events as she personally experienced them. Her wax sculptures were visceral. She made them herself, at times from the living person’s head and at other times from the recently guillotined head of a former houseguest. As a result, people were drawn to her wax displays because they were the most intense way of experiencing those events themselves. This is the story not only of a unique artist, but of how one of history’s bloodiest events influenced her life and work.

The first ever full-length study exploring how Dickens's fiction engaged with, responded to, and even exploited Victorian attitudes to death.