A Cultural History of Death in the Age of Empire

Helen MacDonald

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350654570
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book examines death's changing topography in Britain, France, the US, sub-Saharan Africa, British India, Australia and elsewhere from the perspectives of history, anthropology, and literary studies. It illuminates the religious and civil rites of passage societies created and maintained to mark dying, death and the treatment of human remains at a time when large forces were transforming the world.

The essays in this volume illustrate the ways in which power went to work in death's realm during a period of severe dislocation associated with industrialization, urbanization and imperialism, and mass movements of people, both forced and free. They show how, between 1800 and 1920 in the west, certain people's bodies were considered to be of more value than others, so while some were cared for and memorialized those who were socially disconnected and poor were vulnerable to being turned into objects of study or disposed of in paupers' graves. Meanwhile, abroad, imperialists acted upon the belief that idealized western ways of dying and corpse disposal had most moral worth. In empire's cause they interfered with others' funerary and mortuary rituals, and deployed political and scientific theories to argue that high local mortality rates reflected a people's own moral and material backwardness, and that the extinction of so-called savage races was inevitable rather than man-made.

A Cultural History of Death is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com . Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com .

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editor’s Preface Douglas J. Davies
• Introduction: Mapping Death in the Age of Empire Helen MacDonald
• 1 Dead and Dying Bodies: Knowing, Counting, and Accounting Christopher Hamlin
• 2 The Sensory Aesthetics of Death Elizabeth Hallam
• 3 Emotions, Mortality, and Vitality: Grief and Mourning in the Long Nineteenth Century Julie-Marie Strange
• 4 Death’s Ritual-Symbolic Performance: Sub-Saharan Africa Rebekah Lee
• 5 Sites, Power, and Politics of Death Thomas Laqueur
• 6 Gender, Age, and Identity: Colonial Encounters with Death in British India Andrea Major
• 7 Explaining Death: Belief, Law, and Ethics: Nineteenth-Century Discourse about Mass Extinctions Patrick Brantlinger
• 8 The Undead and Eternal: Science and Human Remains Helen MacDonald
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index