Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain PDF Download

Author: Simon Gunn
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

View

Book Description
In this wide-ranging volume, leading scholars across several disciplines--history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies--investigate the nature of liberalism and modernity in imperial Britain since the eighteenth century. They show how Britain's liberal version of modernity (of capitalism, democracy, and imperialism) was the product of a peculiar set of historical circumstances that continues to haunt our neoliberal present.

Author: James Vernon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520282043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

View

Book Description
What does it mean to live in the modern world? How different is that world from those that preceded it, and when did we become modern? In Distant Strangers, James Vernon argues that the world was made modern not by revolution, industrialization, or the Enlightenment. Instead, he shows how in Britain, a place long held to be the crucible of modernity, a new and distinctly modern social condition emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. Rapid and sustained population growth, combined with increasing mobility of people over greater distances and concentrations of people in cities, created a society of strangers. Vernon explores how individuals in modern societies adapted to live among strangers by forging more abstract and anonymous economic, social, and political relations, as well as by reanimating the local and the personal.

Author: James Vernon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108293506
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1068

View

Book Description
This wide-ranging introduction to the history of modern Britain extends from the eighteenth century to the present day. James Vernon's distinctive history is weaved around an account of the rise, fall and reinvention of liberal ideas of how markets, governments and empires should work. The history takes seriously the different experiences within the British Isles and the British Empire, and offers a global history of Britain. Instead of tracing how Britons made the modern world, Vernon shows how the world shaped the course of Britain's modern history. Richly illustrated with figures and maps, the book features textboxes (on particular people, places and sources), further reading guides, highlighted key terms and a glossary. A supplementary online package includes additional primary sources, discussion questions, and further reading suggestions, including useful links. This textbook is an essential resource for introductory courses on the history of modern Britain.

Author: Catherine Hall
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526103028
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

View

Book Description
Slavery and the slavery business have cast a long shadow over British history. In 1833, abolition was heralded as evidence of Britain’s claim to be the modern global power. Yet much is still unknown about the significance of the slavery business and emancipation in the formation of modern imperial Britain. This book engages with current work exploring the importance of slavery and slave-ownership in the re-making of the British imperial world after abolition in 1833. The contributors to this collection, drawn from Britain, the Caribbean and Mauritius, include some of the most distinguished writers in the field: Clare Anderson, Robin Blackburn, Heather Cateau, Mary Chamberlain, Chris Evans, Pat Hudson, Richard Huzzey, Zoë Laidlaw, Alison Light, Anita Rupprecht, Verene A. Shepherd, Andrea Stuart and Vijaya Teelock. The impact of slavery and slave-ownership is once again becoming a major area of historical and contemporary concern: this book makes a vital contribution to the subject.

Author: Karuna Mantena
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691128162
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

View

Book Description
Alibis of Empire presents a novel account of the origins, substance, and afterlife of late imperial ideology. Karuna Mantena challenges the idea that Victorian empire was primarily legitimated by liberal notions of progress and civilization. In fact, as the British Empire gained its farthest reach, its ideology was being dramatically transformed by a self-conscious rejection of the liberal model. The collapse of liberal imperialism enabled a new culturalism that stressed the dangers and difficulties of trying to "civilize" native peoples. And, hand in hand with this shift in thinking was a shift in practice toward models of indirect rule. As Mantena shows, the work of Victorian legal scholar Henry Maine was at the center of these momentous changes. Alibis of Empire examines how Maine's sociotheoretic model of "traditional" society laid the groundwork for the culturalist logic of late empire. In charting the movement from liberal idealism, through culturalist explanation, to retroactive alibi within nineteenth-century British imperial ideology, Alibis of Empire unearths a striking and pervasive dynamic of modern empire.

Author: Joanna de Groot
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526110962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

View

Book Description
This wide-ranging and accessible book examines the effects of British imperial involvements on history writing in Britain since 1750. It provides a chronological account of the development of history writing in its social, political, and cultural contexts, and an analysis of the structural links between those involvements and the dominant concerns of that writing. The author looks at the impact of imperial and global expansion on the treatment of government, of social structures and changes and of national and ethnic identity in scholarly and popular works, in school histories, and in ‘famous’ history books. In a clear and student-friendly way, the book argues that involvement in empire played a transformative and central role within history writing as whole, reframing its basic assumptions and language, and sustaining a significant ‘imperial’ influence across generations of writers and diverse types of historical text.

Author: Andrew Sartori
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520281691
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

View

Book Description
While the need for a history of liberalism that goes beyond its conventional European limits is well recognized, the agrarian backwaters of the British Empire might seem an unlikely place to start. Yet specifically liberal preoccupations with property and freedom evolved as central to agrarian policy and politics in colonial Bengal. Liberalism in Empire explores the generative crisis in understanding property’s role in the constitution of a liberal polity, which intersected in Bengal with a new politics of peasant independence based on practices of commodity exchange. Thus the conditions for a new kind of vernacular liberalism were created. Andrew Sartori’s examination shows the workings of a section of liberal policy makers and agrarian leaders who insisted that norms governing agrarian social relations be premised on the property-constituting powers of labor, which opened a new conceptual space for appeals to both political economy and the normative significance of property. It is conventional to see liberalism as traveling through the space of empire with the extension of colonial institutions and intellectual networks. Sartori’s focus on the Lockeanism of agrarian discourses of property, however, allows readers to grasp how liberalism could serve as a normative framework for both a triumphant colonial capitalism and a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of peasant property.

Author: Angus Hawkins
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191044148
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

View

Book Description
Victorian Britain is often described as an age of dawning democracy and as an exemplar of the modern Liberal state; yet a hereditary monarchy, a hereditary House of Lords, and an established Anglican Church survived as influential aspects of national public life with traditional elites assuming redefined roles. After 1832, constitutional notions of 'mixed government' gradually gave way to the orthodoxy of 'parliamentary government', shaping the function and nature of political parties in Westminster and the constituencies, as well as the relations between them. Following the 1867-8 Reform Acts, national political parties began to replace the premises of 'parliamentary government'. The subsequent emergence of a mass male electorate in the 1880s and 1890s prompted politicians to adopt new language and methods by which to appeal to voters, while enduring public values associated with morality, community and evocations of the past continued to shape Britain's distinctive political culture. This gave a particularly conservative trajectory to the nation's entry into the twentieth century. This study of British political culture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century examines the public values that informed perceptions of the constitution, electoral activity, party partisanship, and political organization. Its exploration of Victorian views of status, power, and authority as revealed in political language, speeches, and writing, as well as theology, literature, and science, shows how the development of moral communities rooted in readings of the past enabled politicians to manage far-reaching change. This presents a new over-arching perspective on the constitutional and political transformations of the Victorian age.

Author: Theodore Koditschek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139494880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

View

Book Description
This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.

Author: Ishita Pande
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136972412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

View

Book Description
This book focuses on the entwinement of politics and medicine and power and knowledge in India during the age of empire. Using the powerful metaphor of ‘pathology’ - the science of the origin, nature, and course of diseases - the author develops and challenges a burgeoning literature on colonial medicine, moving beyond discussions of state medicine and the control of epidemics to everyday life, to show how medicine was a fundamental ideology of empire. Related to this point, and engaging with postcolonial histories of biopower and modernity, the book highlights the use of this racially grounded medicine in the formulation of modern selves and subjectivities in late colonial India. In tracing the cultural determinants of biological race theory and contextualizing the understanding of race as pathology, the book demonstrates how racialism was compatible with the ideologies and policies of imperial liberalism. Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal brings together the study of modern South Asia, race theory, colonialism and empire and the history of medicine. It highlights the powerful role played by the idea of ‘pathology’ in the rationalization of imperial liberalism and the subsequent projects of modernity embraced by native experts in Bengal in the ‘long’ nineteenth century.