The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History
The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History

Author: Stephanie Barczewski

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 3030244598

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This book celebrates the career of the eminent historian of the British Empire John M. MacKenzie, who pioneered the examination of the impact of the Empire on metropolitan culture. It is structured around three areas: the cultural impact of empire, 'Four-Nations' history, and global and transnational perspectives. These essays demonstrate MacKenzie’s influence but also interrogate his legacy for the study of imperial history, not only for Britain and the nations of Britain but also in comparative and transnational context. Written by seventeen historians from around the world, its subjects range from Jumbomania in Victorian Britain to popular imperial fiction, the East India Company, the ironic imperial revivalism of the 1960s, Scotland and Ireland and the empire, to transnational Chartism and Belgian colonialism. The essays are framed by three evaluations of what will be known as 'the MacKenzian moment' in the study of imperialism.

The empire of nature
The empire of nature

Author: John M. MacKenzie

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2017-03-01

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1526119587

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This study assesses the significance of the hunting cult as a major element of the imperial experience in Africa and Asia. Through a study of the game laws and the beginnings of conservation in the 19th and early-20th centuries, the author demonstrates the racial inequalities which existed between Europeans and indigenous hunters. Africans were denied access to game, and the development of game reserves and national parks accelerated this process. Indigenous hunters in Africa and India were turned into "poachers" and only Europeans were permitted to hunt. In India, the hunting of animals became the chief recreation of military officers and civilian officials, a source of display and symbolic dominance of the environment. Imperial hunting fed the natural history craze of the day, and many hunters collected trophies and specimens for private and public collections as well as contributing to hunting literature. Adopting a radical approach to issues of conservation, this book links the hunting cult in Africa and India to the development of conservation, and consolidates widely-scattered material on the importance of hunting to the economics and nutrition of African societies.

Metropolitan Science
Metropolitan Science

Author: Rebekah Higgitt

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-08-22

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 135041705X

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Exploring distinctive practices in the artisanal, mercantile, and governmental sites of London, Metropolitan Science offers a new perspective on the development of a scientific culture between the years 1600-1800. Beginning with the demographics of London in the 17th and 18th centuries, including its attraction of migrants, importance as a centre of empire, and the role of its institutions in government, the authors analyse how and why London was a unique site of scientific activity. Through the use of case studies, such as the Tower of London's Royal Mint, and the Livery Company Halls, this book examines the city's sites of exchange for knowledge and practice, and highlights the importance of both public and private spaces. With exploration of London's military and colonial history, the authors acknowledge how its port and maritime trade were not only central to growth and protection, but also facilitated the organisation, assessment, valuation, and pursuit of knowledge in the city. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that London corporations produced unique knowledge communities that drew on networks across the city and beyond, and uses a variety of spatial and material approaches to reveal the use, representation, and exchange of practice in these collective settings.

The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy
The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy

Author: Michael Quinn Dudley

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-10-17

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1527539369

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For nearly 200 years, people have questioned the identity of Shakespeare; however, this debate is often dismissed by most scholars as “just a conspiracy theory,” with the life of the poet-playwright being “beyond doubt.” And yet, the documented facts related to the man from Stratford are meagre—where they exist at all—forcing biographers to rely heavily on their own imaginations. What does it mean to say that the traditional stance on Shakespeare’s authorship is a belief as opposed to a search for knowledge? What are the ethical implications of declaring that some history is “beyond doubt,” and that no debate about it may be permitted? What can theories of knowledge, truth and rhetoric tell us about how knowledge of Shakespeare has been constructed and justified? To the extent that this belief has consequences for society, can it then be said to be an ethical one? Finally, what difference does it actually make—from a pragmatic perspective—who the Author was? Highly original in its scope, The Shakespeare Authorship Question and Philosophy sets out the debate’s many profound philosophical dimensions concerning knowledge, historiography, truth and academic freedom—implications that transcend the debate itself.

The Wireless World
The Wireless World

Author: Simon J. Potter

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 019286498X

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The Wireless World sets out a new research agenda for the history of international broadcasting, and for radio history more generally. It examines global and transnational histories of long-distance wireless broadcasting, combining perspectives from international history, media and cultural history, the history of technology, and sound studies. It is a co-written book, the result of more than five years of collaboration. Bringing together their knowledge of a wide range of different countries, languages, and archives, the co-authors show how broadcasters and states deployed international broadcasting as a tool of international communication and persuasion. They also demonstrate that by paying more attention to audiences, programmes, and soundscapes, historians of international broadcasting can make important contributions to wider debates in social and cultural history. Exploring the idea of a 'wireless world', a globe connected, both in imagination and reality, by radio, The Wireless World sheds new light on the transnational connections created by international broadcasting. Bringing together all periods of international broadcasting within a single analytical frame, including the pioneering days of wireless, the Second World War, the Cold War, and the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the study reveals key continuities and transformations. It looks at how wireless was shaped by internationalist ideas about the use of broadcasting to promote world peace and understanding, at how empires used broadcasting to perpetuate colonialism, and at how anti-colonial movements harnessed radio as a weapon of decolonization.

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge
The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

Author: Joshua Ehrlich

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-07-06

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1009367994

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The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.

Leftist Internationalisms
Leftist Internationalisms

Author: Michele Di Donato

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-01-26

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1350247936

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This volume offers a new perspective on the political history of the socialist, communist and alternative political Lefts, focusing on the role of networks and transnational connections. Embedding the history of left-wing internationalism into a new political history approach, it accounts for global and transnational turns in the study of left-wing politics. The essays in this collection study a range of examples of international engagement and transnational cooperation in which left-wing actors were involved, and explore how these interactions shaped the globalization of politics throughout the 20th century. In taking a multi-archival and methodological approach, this book challenges two conventional views - that the left gradually abandoned its original international to focus exclusively on the national framework, and that internationalism survived merely as a rhetorical device. Instead, this collection highlights how different currents of the Left developed their own versions of internationalism in order to adapt to the transformation of politics in the interdependent 20th-century world. Demonstrating the importance of political convergence, alliance-formation, network construction and knowledge circulation within and between the socialist and communist movements, it shows that the influence of internationalism is central to understanding the foreign policy of various left-wing parties and movements.

Radiophilia
Radiophilia

Author: Carolyn Birdsall

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-08-24

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1501374990

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A century ago, the emergence of radio, along with organized systems of broadcasting, sparked a global fascination with the 'wonder' of sound transmission and reception. The thrilling experience of tuning in to the live sounds of this new medium prompted strong affective responses in its listeners. This book introduces a new concept of radiophilia, defined as the attachment to, or even a love of radio. Treating radiophilia as a dynamic cultural phenomenon, it unpacks the various pleasures associated with radio and its sounds, the desire to discover and learn new things via radio, and efforts to record, re-experience, and share radio. Surveying 100 years of radio from early wireless through to digital audio formats like podcasting, the book engages in debates about fandom, audience participation, listening experience, material culture, and how media relate to affect and emotions.

Imperial Inequalities
Imperial Inequalities

Author: Gurminder K. Bhambra

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2022-11-29

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1526166135

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Imperial Inequalities takes Western European empires and their legacies as the explicit starting point for discussion of issues of taxation and welfare. In doing so, it addresses the institutional and fiscal processes involved in modes of extraction, taxation, and the hierarchies of welfare distribution across Europe’s global empires. The idea of ‘imperial inequalities’ provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the long-standing colonial histories that are responsible, at least in part, for the shape of present inequalities. This wide-ranging volume challenges existing historiographical accounts that present states and empires as separate categories. Instead, it views them as co-constitutive units by focusing upon the politics of economic governance across imperial spaces. Authors examine the fiscal innovations that enabled European empires to finance their expansion, the politics of redistribution that were important to constructing the veneer of legitimacy of taxation, and the fiscal mechanisms that were established to ensure that the imperial contours of inequality continued to define the postcolonial world. These diverse contributions provide new resources for how we think about issues of taxation and welfare across the longue durée. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced inequalities

Decolonising Europe?
Decolonising Europe?

Author: Berny Sèbe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-01

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0429639376

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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 also complex intra-European dynamics at a time of political convergence following the Treaty of Rome. Decolonisation was neither a process of sudden, rapid changes to European cultures nor one of cultural inertia, but a development marked by fluidity, movement, and dynamism. Rather than being a static process where Europe’s (former) metropoles and their peoples ‘at home’ reacted to the end of empire ‘out there’, decolonisation translated into new realities for Europe’s cultures, societies, and politics as flows, ebbs, fluxes, and cultural refluxes reshaped both former colonies and former metropoles. The volume’s contributors set out a carefully crafted panorama of decolonisation’s sequels in European popular culture by means of in-depth studies of specific cases and media, analysing the interwoven meaning, momentum, memory, material culture, and migration patterns of the end of empire across eight major European countries. The revised meaning of ‘decolonisation’ that emerges will challenge scholars in several fields, and the panorama of new research in the book charts paths for new investigations. The question mark in the title asks not only how European cultures experienced the ‘end of empire’ but also the extent to which this is still a work in progress.