This reader collects together articles by key historians, literary critics and anthropologists on the cultures of colonialism in the British Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is divided into three sections: theoretical, emphasizing approaches; the colonisers "at home"; and "away".

Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern explores the problematic formation of national culture within modern English society. In this ambitious work of post-colonial and cultural theory, C. J. Wan-ling Wee investigates the complex interaction between a modern, industrialized, metropolitan, and progressively rational English national culture and a nationalistic imperial discourse interested in territorial expansion and the valorization of an idealized agrarian past. Starting with the Victorian era, the work documents the complex relationship of concepts such as 'home' and 'frontier' and 'EnglishO and 'colonial' through an analysis of key literary-cultural figures in their historical contexts: Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, T.S. Eliot, and V.S. Naipaul. Wee brings the discussion of modernity into the present with a consideration of post-imperial Singapore--a neo-traditionalist modern society that reworks many of the colonial tropes and contradictions--to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions revealed in the West's engagement with modernity.

Queer Theory: Law, Culture, Empire uses queer theory to examine the complex interactions of law, culture, and empire. Building on recent work on empire, and taking contextual, socio-legal, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches, it studies how activists and scholars engaged in queer theory projects can unwittingly advance imperial projects and how queer theory can itself show imperial ambitions. The authors – from five continents – delve into examples drawn from Bollywood cinema to California’s 2008 marriage referendum. The chapters view a wide range of texts – from cultural productions to laws and judgments – as regulatory forces requiring scrutiny from outside Western, heterosexual privilege. This innovative collection goes beyond earlier queer legal work, engaging with recent developments, featuring case studies from India, South Africa, the US, Australasia, Eastern Europe, and embracing the frames offered by different disciplinary lenses. Queer Theory: Law, Culture, Empire will be of particular interest to students and researchers in the fields of socio-legal studies, comparative law, law and gender/sexuality, and law and culture.

EMPIRE, STATE, AND SOCIETY “This book captures the broad-sweep of modern British history. Bronstein and Harris’s narrative is distinguished by its comprehensive coverage, readability, and sure judgment. It is an excellent book.” James Epstein, Vanderbilt University “This is a well-structured and gracefully written textbook that undergraduates at American universities and colleges should find highly accessible. It integrates recent scholarly trends into a compelling narrative that brings together metropolitan and imperial themes. These themes are illuminated by well-chosen anecdotes that make them come alive. Bronstein and Harris have provided an excellent introduction to modern Britain and its Empire, and one that deserves a wide readership.” Phil Harling, University of Kentucky In the nineteenth century, Great Britain was a world-recognized superpower. Tremendous economic growth fostered a daunting formal empire, global networks of trade and investment, and a formidable military. By the late twentieth century this position of dominance had eroded significantly under the stress of two world wars, rising nationalist movements, shifting geopolitics, and the transformation to a post-industrial economy. As Britain adjusts to her new place in the post-colonial world, Empire, State, and Society assesses the external and internal forces behind these transformations. The authors draw on the most recent scholarship to give due importance to social, economic, and cultural changes as well as politics and international diplomacy. Divided into chapters both chronologically and thematically, Empire, State, and Society enables detailed exploration of issues such as race, gender, religion, and the environment. In doing so, the book provides an accessible, comprehensive, and balanced introduction to British history.

Crossroads and Cultures: A History of the World’s Peoples incorporates the best current cultural history into a fresh and original narrative that connects global patterns of development with life on the ground. As the title, “Crossroads,” suggests, this new synthesis highlights the places and times where people exchanged goods and commodities, shared innovations and ideas, waged war and spread disease, and in doing so joined their lives to the broad sweep of global history. Students benefit from a strong pedagogical design, abundant maps and images, and special features that heighten the narrative’s attention to the lives and voices of the world’s peoples. Test drive a chapter today. Find out how.

The Seven Years' War (1754-1763) was a pivotal event in the history of the Atlantic world. Perspectives on the significance of the war and its aftermath varied considerably from different cultural vantage points. Northern and western Indians, European imperial authorities, and their colonial counterparts understood and experienced the war (known in the United States as the French and Indian War) in various ways. In many instances the progress of the conflict was charted by cultural differences and the implications participants drew from cultural encounters. It is these cultural encounters, their meaning in the context of the Seven Years' War, and their impact on the war and its diplomatic settlement that are the subjects of this volume. Cultures in Conflict: The Seven Years' War in North America addresses the broad pattern of events that framed this conflict's causes, the intercultural dynamics of its conduct, and its profound impact on subsequent events--most notably the American Revolution and a protracted Anglo-Indian struggle for continental control. Warren R. Hofstra has gathered the best of contemporary scholarship on the war and its social and cultural history. The authors examine the viewpoints of British and French imperial authorities, the issues motivating Indian nations in the Ohio Valley, the matter of why and how French colonists fought, the diplomatic and social world of Iroquois Indians, and the responses of British colonists to the conflict. The result of these efforts is a dynamic historical approach in which cultural context provides a rationale for the well-established military and political narrative of the Seven Years' War. These synthetic and interpretive essays mark out new territory in our understanding of the Seven Years' War as we recognize its 250th anniversary.

The hot-air balloon, invented by the Montgolfier brothers in 1783, launched for the second time just days before the Treaty of Paris would end the American Revolutionary War. The ascent in Paris—a technological marvel witnessed by a diverse crowd that included Benjamin Franklin—highlighted celebrations of French military victory against Britain and ignited a balloon mania that swept across Europe at the end of the Enlightenment. This popular frenzy for balloon experiments, which attracted hundreds of thousands of spectators, fundamentally altered the once elite audience for science by bringing aristocrats and commoners together. The Imagined Empire explores how this material artifact, the flying machine, not only expanded the public for science and spectacle but inspired utopian dreams of a republican monarchy that would obliterate social boundaries. The balloon, Mi Gyung Kim argues, was a people-machine, a cultural performance that unified and mobilized the people of France, who imagined an aerial empire that would bring glory to the French nation. This critical history of ballooning considers how a relatively simple mechanical gadget became an explosive cultural and political phenomenon on the eve of the French Revolution.