This monograph series seeks to explore the complexities of the relationships among empires, modernity and global history. In so doing, it wishes to challenge the orthodoxy that the experience of modernity was located exclusively in the west, and that the non-western world was brought into the modern age through conquest, mimicry and association. To the contrary, modernity had its origins in the interaction between the two worlds.
In this sense the imperial experience was not an adjunct to western modernization, but was constitutive of it. Thus the origins of the defining features of modernity - the bureaucratic state, market economy, governance, and so on - have to be sought in the imperial encounter, as do the categories such as race, sexuality and citizenship which constitute the modern individual. This necessarily complicates perspectives on the nature of the relationships between the western and non-western worlds, nation and empire, and 'centre' and 'periphery'.
To examine these issues the series presents work that is interdisciplinary and comparative in its approach; in this respect disciplines including economics, geography, literature, politics, intellectual history, anthropology, science, legal studies, psychoanalysis and cultural studies have much potential, and will all feature. Equally, we consider race, gender and class vital categories to the study of imperial experiences. We aim, therefore, to provide a forum for dialogues among different modes of writing the histories of empires and the modern. Much valuable work on empires is currently undertaken outside the western academy and has yet to receive due attention. This is an imbalance the series intends to address and so we are particularly interested in contributions from such scholars. Also important to us are transnational and comparative perspectives on the imperial experiences of western and non-western worlds.
By Sadhana Naithani
May 20, 2024
This book is a study of selected texts of British writings on Indian wildlife published between 1860 and 1960. Set in the context of British colonial rule in India, this book also reflects on similar situations across the British Empire and other colonial empires. The destruction ...
Edited
By Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, Thomás A. S. Haddad, Kapil Raj
August 18, 2023
Through ten case studies by international specialists, this book investigates the circulation and production of scientific knowledge between 1750 and 1945 in the fields of agriculture, astronomy, botany, cartography, medicine, statistics, and zoology. In this period, most of the world was under ...
By Jane Lydon
September 26, 2022
Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. This book explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the ...
Edited
By Berny Sèbe, Matthew G. Stanard
April 15, 2020
Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire offers a new paradigm to understand decolonisation in Europe by showing how it was fundamentally a fluid process of fluxes and refluxes involving not only transfers of populations, ideas, and sociocultural practices across continents but ...
Edited
By Yu-ting Huang, Rebecca Weaver-Hightower
November 13, 2018
Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Race, and Space brings together 15 essays from across the globe, to capture a moment in settler colonial studies that turns increasingly towards new cultural archives for settler colonial research. Essays on hitherto under-examined materials—including postage...
By Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
August 26, 2016
It is often assumed that the verbal and visual languages of Indigenous people had little influence upon the classification of scientific, legal, and artistic objects in the metropolises and museums of nineteenth-century colonial powers. However colonized locals did more than merely collect material...
Edited
By Liam Matthew Brockey
September 30, 2016
Portuguese Colonial Cities in the Early Modern World is a collection of essays on the cities of the Portuguese empire written by the leading scholars in the field. The volume, like the empire it analyzes, has a global scope and a chronological span of three centuries. The contributions focus on the...
By Prue Ahrens, Lamont Lindstrom, Fiona Paisley
November 28, 2016
During the interwar period Osa and Martin Johnson became famous for their films that brought exotic and far-off locations to the American cinema. Before the advent of mass tourism and television, their films played a major part in providing the means by which large audiences in the US and beyond ...
Edited
By Maxim Waldstein, Sanna Turoma
November 24, 2016
In 1991 the Soviet empire collapsed, at a stroke throwing the certainties of the Cold War world into flux. Yet despite the dramatic end of this 'last empire', the idea of empire is still alive and well, its language and concepts feeding into public debate and academic research. Bringing together ...
Edited
By Gabriel Paquette
November 15, 2016
Efforts to ascertain the influence of enlightenment thought on state action, especially government reform, in the long eighteenth century have long provoked stimulating scholarly quarrels. Generations of historians have grappled with the elusive intersections of enlightenment and absolutism, of ...
By Hibba Abugideiri
September 08, 2016
Gender and the Making of Modern Medicine in Colonial Egypt investigates the use of medicine as a 'tool of empire' to serve the state building process in Egypt by the British colonial administration. It argues that the colonial state effectively transformed Egyptian medical practice and medical ...
By Miles Larmer
September 02, 2016
In 1964 Kenneth Kaunda and his United National Independence Party (UNIP) government established the nation of Zambia in the former British colony of Northern Rhodesia. In parallel with many other newly independent countries in Africa this process of decolonisation created a wave of optimism ...