The first source book to track the role the British empire played in domestic politics, social attitudes and intellectual and cultural life at home, this volume is undergirded by a recognizable political chronology, emphasizing moments of major constitutional reform (1832, 1867) and imperial crisis (1857, 1865, 1882, 1886, 1899). The primary purpose of the reader is to introduce students to the intersections of 'home' and 'empire', so that the effects of imperialism on Victorian politics and society can be fully appreciated.

"Understanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of the era, combining broad surveys with close analysis, and introduces students to the critical debates taking place among historians today. Focusing not just on England but on the whole of Great Britain and Ireland it emphasises class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This book encompasses the whole of the Victorian period giving equal prominence to social and cultural topics alongside the politics and economics. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming right up to the start of World War I in 1914, Susie L. Steinbach uses thematic chapters to discuss and evaluate, the economy, gender, religion, the history of science and ideas, material culture and sexuality. Steinbach also provides much-needed chapters on consumption, which links consumption with production, on law, which explains the legal culture and trials of criminal and scandalous cases and on space which draws to together the most current research in Victorian studies"--Provided by publisher.

Victorian Britain, at the head of the vast British Empire, was the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. Yet, not all Britons were seen as possessing the characteristics that defined what it actually meant to be 'British.' At the Margins of Victorian Britain focuses on the political means of policing unwanted 'others' in Victorian society: the Irish, Catholics and Jews, atheists, prostitutes and homosexuals. In this groundbreaking study, Dennis Grube details the laws and conventions that were legally and culturally enforced in order to bar these 'others' from gaining power and influence in Victorian Britain. Utilizing a wide-ranging analysis, the book focuses on key case-studies: the anti-Semitism implicit in Lord Rothschild's barring from the House of Commons; the fine line between accepted male love and companionship and homosexuality, culminating in the Oscar Wilde trials of the 1890s; and how laws against disease were used to police prostitutes and correct moral vices. Political and legal rhetoric, backed by the force of legislation, set the boundaries of 'Britishness', and enforced those boundaries through the 'majesty' of British law. As Jews, Roman Catholics and atheists were brought into a genuine sense of partnership in the British constitution by being allowed to seek election to Parliament - homosexuals, prostitutes and the allegedly innately criminal Irish found themselves further and more vehemently displaced as the nineteenth century progressed. 'Otherness' stopped being a religious question and became instead a moral one. That fundamental shift marks the moment that 'Britishness' became a values-based question. And we've been arguing about what those values are ever since. This will be essential reading for those working in the fields of Victorian studies, social and cultural history and constitutional identity.

After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of "anti-slavery" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority to other civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave trade, while the Royal Navy enforced abolition worldwide and an anxious public debated the true responsibilities of an anti-slavery nation. This crusade was far from altruistic or compassionate, but Richard Huzzey argues that it forged national debates and political culture long after the famous abolitionist campaigns of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had faded into memory. These anti-slavery passions shaped racist and imperialist prejudices, new forms of coerced labor, and the expansion of colonial possessions.In a sweeping narrative that spans the globe, Freedom Burning explores the intersection of philanthropic, imperial, and economic interests that underlay Britain's anti-slavery zeal— from London to Liberia, the Sudan to South Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, and the British East India Company to the Confederate States of America. Through careful attention to popular culture, official records, and private papers, Huzzey rewrites the history of the British Empire and a century-long effort to end the global trade in human lives.

This is an empirical study of just where in Victorian culture the ideology of imperialism left clear traces of itself. The well-written investigations bring to life how certain men thought about the British Empire between the 1830s and 1868.

This collection of essays explores the questions of what counted as knowledge in Victorian Britain, who defined knowledge and the knowledgeable, by what means and by what criteria. During the Victorian period, the structure of knowledge took on a new and recognizably modern form, and the disciplines we now take for granted took shape. The ways in which knowledge was tested also took on a new form, with the rise of written examinations. New institutions of knowledge were created: museums were important at the start of the period, universities had become prominent by the end. Victorians needed to make sense of the sheer scale of new information, to popularize it, and at the same time to exclude ignorance and error - a role carried out by encyclopaedias and popular publications. By studying the Victorian organization of knowledge in its institutional, social, and intellectual settings, these essays contribute to our wider consideration of the complex and much debated concept of knowledge.

This book is about the life and times of Richard Congreve. This polemicist was the first thinker to gain instant infamy for publishing cogent critiques of imperialism in Victorian Britain. As the foremost British acolyte of Auguste Comte, Congreve sought to employ the philosopher’s new science of sociology to dismantle the British Empire. With an aim to realise in its place Comte’s global vision of utopian socialist republican city-states, the former Oxford don and ex-Anglican minister launched his Church of Humanity in 1859. Over the next forty years, Congreve engaged in some of the most pressing foreign and domestic controversies of his day, despite facing fierce personal attacks in the Victorian press. Congreve made overlooked contributions to the history of science, political economy, and secular ethics. In this book Matthew Wilson argues that Congreve’s polemics, ‘in the name of Humanity’, served as the devotional practices of his Positivist church.