Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction

Nineteenth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Christopher Harvie

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2000-08-10

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0191606499

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published as part of the best-selling The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew's Very Short Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Britain is a sharp but subtle account of remarkable economic and social change and an even more remarkable political stability. Britain in 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, multilingual, and almost half Celtic. By 1914, when it faced its greatest test since the defeat of Napoleon, it was largely urban and English. Christopher Harvie and Colin Matthew show the forces behind Britain's rise to its imperial zenith, and the continuing tensions within the nations and classes of the 'union state'. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.


British Imperialism

British Imperialism

Author: Rob Johnson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 1350317519

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What was British imperialism and was it an important element of modern globalization? Were economic, political or military factors paramount in imperial expansion? Do post-colonial theories assist or mislead historians? How have histories of imperialism changed, and are current analyses satisfactory? Robert Johnson's invaluable guide offers a succint, easy-to-follow introduction to the key issues and historiography of British imperialism from its origins to the conversion to the Commonwealth. British Imperialism - Provides concise introductions to key questions and debates - Takes a question-based approach to analysis of the material - Offers an assessment of the significance of economic, military and political factors in imperial expansion and decolonization - Presents critical appraisals of the most recent controversies including neo-colonialism, cultural imperialism, post-colonial theory, and gender and imperialism - Includes a useful guide to further reading Using vivid examples, Johnson clearly explains the nature of British imperialism and enables the reader to understand the causes, course and immediate consequences of the British-colonial encounter on a world-wide scale. His book is an essential starting point for all those new to the subject and a helpful introduction to more recent debates.


British culture and the end of empire

British culture and the end of empire

Author: Stuart Ward

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1526119625

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book is the first major attempt to examine the cultural manifestations of the demise of imperialism as a social and political ideology in post-war Britain. Far from being a matter of indifference or resigned acceptance as is often suggested, the fall of the British Empire came as a profound shock to the British national imagination, and resonated widely in British popular culture. The sheer range of subjects discussed, from the satire boom of the 1960s to the worlds of sport and the arts, demonstrates how profoundly decolonisation was absorbed into the popular consciousness. Offers an extremely novel and provocative interpretation of post-war British cultural history, and opens up a whole new field of enquiry in the history of decolonisation.


Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire Abridged Edition

Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire Abridged Edition

Author: Lance Edwin Davis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1988-06-24

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780521357234

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Historians have so far made few attempts to assess directly the costs and benefits of Britain's investment in empire. This book presents answers to some of the key questions about the economics of imperialism: how large was the flow of finance to the empire? How great were the profits on empire investment? What were the social costs of maintaining the empire? Who received the profits, and who bore the costs? The authors show that colonial finance did not dominate British capital markets; returns from empire investment were not high in comparison to earnings in the domestic and foreign sectors; there is no evidence of continued exploitative profits; and empire profits were earned at a substantial cost to the taxpayer. They depict British imperialism as a mechanism to effect an income transfer from the tax-paying middle class to the elites in which the ownership of imperial enterprise was heavily concentrated, with some slight net transfer to the colonies in the process.


Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic

Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic

Author: Derek R. Peterson

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2010-01-05

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0821443054

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The abolition of the slave trade is normally understood to be the singular achievement of eighteenth-century British liberalism. Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic expands both the temporal and the geographic framework in which the history of abolitionism is conceived. Abolitionism was a theater in which a variety of actors—slaves, African rulers, Caribbean planters, working-class radicals, British evangelicals, African political entrepreneurs—played a part. The Atlantic was an echo chamber, in which abolitionist symbols, ideas, and evidence were generated from a variety of vantage points. These essays highlight the range of political and moral projects in which the advocates of abolitionism were engaged, and in so doing it joins together geographies that are normally studied in isolation. Where empires are often understood to involve the government of one people over another, Abolitionism and Imperialism shows that British values were formed, debated, and remade in the space of empire. Africans were not simply objects of British liberals’ benevolence. They played an active role in shaping, and extending, the values that Britain now regards as part of its national character. This book is therefore a contribution to the larger scholarship about the nature of modern empires. Contributors: Christopher Leslie Brown, Seymour Drescher, Jonathon Glassman, Boyd Hilton, Robin Law, Phillip D. Morgan, Derek R. Peterson, John K. Thornton


Discovering Imperialism

Discovering Imperialism

Author: Richard B. Day

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-11-25

Total Pages: 965

ISBN-13: 9004201564

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume assembles the main documents of the international debate on imperialism that took place in the Second International during the period 1898-1916. It asseses the contributions of the individual participants, placing them in the context of contemporary political debates.


British Imperialism

British Imperialism

Author: P.J. Cain

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-02

Total Pages: 794

ISBN-13: 1317389255

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A milestone in the understanding of British history and imperialism, this ground-breaking book radically reinterprets the course of modern economic development and the causes of overseas expansion during the past three centuries. Employing their concept of 'gentlemanly capitalism', the authors draw imperial and domestic British history together to show how the shape of the nation and its economy depended on international and imperial ties, and how these ties were undone to produce the post-colonial world of today. Containing a significantly expanded and updated Foreword and Afterword, this third edition assesses the development of the debate since the book’s original publication, discusses the imperial era in the context of the controversy over globalization, and shows how the study of the age of empires remains relevant to understanding the post-colonial world. Covering the full extent of the British empire from China to South America and taking a broad chronological view from the seventeenth century to post-imperial Britain today, British Imperialism: 1688–2015 is the perfect read for all students of imperial and global history.


Colonialism and Welfare

Colonialism and Welfare

Author: James Midgley

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 184980849X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The British Empire is part covered three centuries, five continents and onequarter of the world's population. Its legacy continues, shaping the societies and welfare policies of much of the modern world. In this book, for the first time, this legacy is explored and analysed. Colonialism and Welfare reveals that social welfare policies, often discriminatory, and challenging to those colonised were introduced and imposed by the ?mother country.' It highlights that there was great diversity in rationales and impacts across the empire, but past developments had a major impact on the development of much of the world's population. Contributions from every continent explore both the diversity and the common themes in the imperial experience. They examine the legacy of colonial welfare - a subject largely neglected by both historians of empire and social policy analysts. This original book shows that social welfare today cannot be understood without understanding the legacy of the British Empire. Academics, specialised students with an interest in comparative social policy, history of social policy, imperial history, colonialism, and contemporary third world social policy will find this book invaluable to their studies.


Imperial Intimacies

Imperial Intimacies

Author: Hazel V. Carby

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2019-09-24

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 1788735110

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.