Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c. 1785-1845
Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c. 1785-1845

Author: Prasannajit de Silva

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-07-26

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1527514285

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A stereotypical view of the nineteenth-century British in India, which might be characterised as one of deliberate isolation and segregation from their surroundings, has recently been complemented by one evoking a high degree of integration and closer co-existence in the eighteenth century. Focusing on a period which straddles this apparent shift, this book explores a variety of ways in which British residents in India represented their lives through visual material, and reveals a more nuanced position. Consideration of these images, which have often been overlooked in the scholarly literature, opens up questions of identity facing the British population in India at this time and facing colonial societies more generally, and issues about the role of visual culture in negotiating them. It also underlines the fragile and contested nature of identity: the colonists’ self-fashioning encompassed not only expressions of difference from their Indian setting, but also what distinguished them from their compatriots back in Britain, as well as engaging with metropolitan attitudes towards, and prejudices about, them.

Collecting and Displaying China's “Summer Palace” in the West
Collecting and Displaying China's “Summer Palace” in the West

Author: Louise Tythacott

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-25

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 135162489X

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In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted and destroyed one of the most important palace complexes in imperial China—the Yuanmingyuan. Known in the West as the "Summer Palace," this site consisted of thousands of buildings housing a vast art collection. It is estimated that over a million objects may have been taken from the palaces in the Yuanmingyuan—and many of these are now scattered around the world, in private collections and public museums. With contributions from leading specialists, this is the first book to focus on the collecting and display of "Summer Palace" material over the past 150 years in museums in Britain and France. It examines the way museums placed their own cultural, political and aesthetic concerns upon Yuanmingyuan material, and how displays—especially those at the Royal Engineers Museum in Kent, the National Museum of Scotland and the Musée Chinois at the Château of Fontainebleau—tell us more about European representations and images of China, than they do about the Yuanmingyuan itself.