Download Free A Cultural History Of The British Empire Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online A Cultural History Of The British Empire and write the review.

A compelling history of British imperial culture, showing how it was adopted and subverted by colonial subjects around the world As the British Empire expanded across the globe, it exported more than troops and goods. In every colony, imperial delegates dispersed British cultural forms. Facilitated by the rapid growth of print, photography, film, and radio, imperialists imagined this new global culture would cement the unity of the empire. But this remarkably wide-ranging spread of ideas had unintended and surprising results. In this groundbreaking history, John M. MacKenzie examines the importance of culture in British imperialism. MacKenzie describes how colonized peoples were quick to observe British culture--and adapted elements to their own ends, subverting British expectations and eventually beating them at their own game. As indigenous communities integrated their own cultures with the British imports, the empire itself was increasingly undermined. From the extraordinary spread of cricket and horse racing to statues and ceremonies, MacKenzie presents an engaging imperial history--one with profound implications for global culture in the present day.
Up to World War II and beyond, the British ruled over a vast empire. Modern western attitudes towards the imperial past tend either towards nostalgia for British power or revulsion at what seem to be the abuses of that power. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire adopts neither of these approaches. It aims to create historical understanding about the British empire on the assumption that such understanding is important for any informed appreciation of the modern world. Through striking illustration and a text written by leading experts, this book examines the experience of colonialism in North America, India, Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean, as well as the impact of the empire on Britain itself. Emphasis is placed on social and cultural history, including slavery, trade, religion, art, and the movement of ideas. How did the British rule their empire? Who benefited economically from the empire? And who lost?
'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.
Examines the history of British worldwide expansion from the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a crucial phase in the creation of the modern British Empire.
To China and Latin America, often regarded as central components of a British 'informal empire'.
19th-century British imperial expansion dramatically shaped today's globalised world. Imperialism encouraged mass migrations of people, shifting flora, fauna and commodities around the world and led to a series of radical environmental changes never before experienced in history. Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire explores how these networks shaped ecosystems, cultures and societies throughout the British Empire and how they were themselves transformed by local and regional conditions. This multi-authored volume begins with a rigorous theoretical analysis of the categories of 'empire' and 'imperialism'. Its chapters, written by leading scholars in the field, draw methodologically from recent studies in environmental history, post-colonial theory and the history of science. Together, these perspectives provide a comprehensive historical understanding of how the British Empire reshaped the globe during the 19th and 20th centuries. This book will be an important addition to the literature on British imperialism and global ecological change.
De-Illustrating the History of the British Empire aims to offer a timely and inclusive contribution to the evolving cross-disciplinary scholarship that connects visual studies with British imperial historiography. The key purpose of this book is to introduce scholars and students of British imperial and Commonwealth history to a clearly presented and diversely themed evaluation of several "visual manuscripts" – images of all genres depicting particular events, personalities, social and cultural contexts – that document the development of some of the British imperial and post-colonial visual literacies history. The concept of "visual manuscripts" alongside theories of visual anthropology and memory studies are addressed across the entire volume thus allowing the readers to approach with greater ease the discourse on imperial iconography and historiography.
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.
What were the cultural factors that held the British world together? How was Britishness understood at home, in the Empire, and in areas of informal British influence? This book makes the case for a ‘cultural British world’, and examines how it took shape in a wide range of locations, ranging from India to Jamaica, from Sierra Leone to Australia, and from south China to New Zealand. These eleven original essays explore a wide range of topics, including images of nakedness, humanitarianism, anti-slavery, literary criticism, travel narratives, legal cultures, visions of capitalism, and household possessions. The book argues that the debates around these issues, as well as the consumer culture associated with them, helped give the British world a sense of cohesion and identity. This book will be essential reading for historians of imperialism and globalisation, and includes contributions from some of the most prominent historians of British imperial and cultural history.
A collection of essays dealing with British expansion in the 17th and 18th centuries. An introduction surveys British imperial history, providing a context for the focus on specific ethnic groups--Native Americans, African-Americans, Scotch-Irish, Dutch, and Germans--and how these groups effected British expansion in Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and the West Indies. A conclusion assesses the impact of North American colonies on British society and politics. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR