The cultural construction of the British world

Barry Crosbie, Mark Hampton

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781526127136
  9780719097898
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784996918
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the cultural construction of the British world
• Naked natives and noble savages: the cultural work of nakedness in imperial Britain
• British radicals in Asia and the persistence of empire c. 1820–1950
• Sugar wars: the culture of free trade versus the culture of anti-slavery in Britain and the British Caribbean, 1840–50
• At home in the Ottoman Empire: humanitarianism and the Victorian diplomat
• A semi-exclusionary empire? The use of British colonial ideals in Trinidad and Bengal
• The curious case of the chabutra-wallahs: Britons and Irish imperial culture in nineteenth-century India
• Sorting out China: British accounts from pre-Opium War Canton
• John Stuart Mill’s other island: the discourse of unbridled capitalism in post-war Hong Kong
• Scrutiny abroad: literary criticism and the colonial public
• Mr Hickey’s pictures: Britons and their collectibles in late eighteenth-century India
• Material culture and Sierra Leone’s civilising mission in the nineteenth century
• Index