Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire

Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, 1860-1950

Jane Haggis, Clare Midgley, Margaret Allen, Fiona Paisley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319527475
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319527482
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book looks back to the period 1860 to 1950 in order to grasp how alternative visions of amity and co-existence were forged between people of faith, both within and resistant to imperial contact zones. It argues that networks of faith and friendship played a vital role in forging new vocabularies of cosmopolitanism that presaged the post-imperial world of the 1950s. In focussing on the diverse cosmopolitanisms articulated within liberal transnational networks of faith it is not intended to reduce or ignore the centrality of racisms, and especially hegemonic whiteness, in underpinning the spaces and subjectivities that these networks formed within and through. Rather, the book explores how new forms of cosmopolitanism could be articulated despite the awkward complicities and liminalities inhabited by individuals and characteristic of cosmopolitan thought zones. 

Table of contents

• Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire
• 1 Friendship, Faith and Cosmopolitan Thought Zones on the Cusp of Empire
• 2 The Cosmopolitan Biography of the English Religious Liberal, Feminist and Writer, Sophia Dobson Collet
• 3 Henry Polak: The Cosmopolitan Life of a Jewish Theosophist, Friend of India and Anti-racist Campaigner
• 4 Provincialised Cosmopolitanisms: Jehangir P. Patel and Marjorie Sykes
• 5 Cosmopolitan Modernity and Post-imperial Relations: Dominion Australia and Indian Internationalism in the Interwar Pacific
• 6 The Limits of Cosmopolitanism on the Cusp of Empire
• Index