1,720,988 research outputs found
Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Imperial Boredom: Monotony and the British Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018.
No full textJeffrey Auerbach’s latest book, Imperial Boredom : Monotony and the British Empire (2018), is
a remarkably rich compilation of complaints and confessions of boredom by British colonists
across the empire in its heyday, the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 1 The author
argues that, despite the exciting stories of glory and adventure which promoted imperial expansion
and colonization (usually conveyed by propagandistic materials such as published
memoirs, travel narratives, and commissioned art), the British empire turned out to be a boring
and disappointing endeavour for several individuals who travelled across, represented,
settled, governed, and fought for it. This is a provocatively original argument in the study of
imperial history. By rereading British imperial primary sources through the critical prism suggested
by Auerbach, historians of the British empire are able to detect, beyond the gloriously
apologetic narrative of the civilizing mission, numerous pieces of evidence demonstrating
that the government of the empire in the bombastically portrayed age of ‘high imperialism’
was indeed a dull, dreary, and deflating drudgery
Katie Donington, The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019
No full textBy throwing the legacy of transatlantic slavery and empire into today’s society, Katie Donington’s book shows how the tight interconnections between colonialism and capitalism have shaped the world we live in. This broader aim is accomplished by means of a meticulous historical analysis of an ‘empire within the empire’: the commercial and proprietary empire of the extended British family of the Hibberts who were Manchester merchants, Anglo-Jamaican slavers and planters, London traders, insurance brokers, pro-slavery lobbyists, members of Parliament, and country landlords. Spanning over one hundred and fifty years of British history (from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries) and travelling from England to Jamaica and back, the book sheds light on the complicities between the coercive and racialized system of West Indian slavery and the making and flourishing of a white family fortune in the two worlds over four generations
In Love with Social Order: William Allen and the ‘Science’ and ‘Art’ of Early Nineteenth-Century British Philanthropy
No full textThis article surveys the charitable and humanitarian activities of the Quaker philanthropist William Allen (1770–843), who was at the forefront of several campaigns for the relief and schooling of the poor and labouring classes in Britain and the emancipation and ‘civilisation’ of the enslaved and colonised peoples in the broader empire between the late eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries. By focusing on the first series of Allen's periodical The Philanthropist (1811–19), the essay sheds light on the underlying principles of early nineteenth-century philanthropy as programmatically different from the motivations of traditional private charity. Understood as a political yet nonstate activity, associational philanthropy demarcated the space of civil society as the field where the middle classes, still excluded from the franchise, could impact state legislation and public policies. As they shared the same critical views as political economists on the statutory system of the Poor Laws, these philanthropists played a crucial role in enlarging the ‘scale’ of social policy-making from the parish to the nation in the early nineteenth century. The article argues that even though they were religiously inspired, Allen and his associates understood philanthropy as a secular pursuit aimed at promoting material welfare and incrementing the utilitarian ‘stock of happiness’ of society. As such, philanthropy was even explicitly conceptualised as a ‘social science’, which, being driven by a love for an ordered society rather than for other men, prescribed the policies to be adopted by the ‘art’ of government
Nel solco della controstoria: Società, governo e ordine nel pensiero amministrativo imperiale britannico
No full textThis essay reconsiders British imperial administrative thought through the lens of Domenico Losurdo’s «counter-history of liberalism». The liberal reflection of a select number of British colonial governors and administrators is analysed around three major imperial crises: the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and the Indian Rebellion of 1857. By adopting a global perspective on these processes, the essay shows how the administrators of the British Empire contributed to the debates around some key notions of the modern liberal lexicon (empire, liberty, equality, citizenship, sovereignty, civili-zation) in a way that linked the United States independence to the French and the Haitian Revolutions, the emancipation of the West Indian enslaved to the work discipline of British labourers, and the constitutional developments in the colonies to the electoral reforms extending the franchise to the middle and the working classes in 19th-century Britain. The article especially focuses on the cat-egories of government and order as the core concepts for a history of imperial administrative thought. Midway between theory and praxis, at the junction of state and society, and traveling from the metropole to the colonies (and back), British imperial administrators combined their speculation upon politics and so-ciety with the concrete implementation of governmental and legal techniques aimed to produce social and international order
Recensione di M.M. Payk and K.C. Priemel (eds.), Crafting the International Order: Practitioners and Practices of International Law since c.1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)
No full textrecensione al libro di Payk e Priemel, Crafting the International Orde
Innamorati della società: Le origini filantropiche della scienza sociale in Gran Bretagna (1790-1857)
No full textLe origini della scienza sociale in Gran Bretagna sono da rintracciare nella storia del movimento filantropico. Fu nel circuito delle associazioni caritatevoli, infatti, che l’espressione «social science» iniziò a essere precocemente utilizzata nel 1790. Più in particolare, fu la filantropia stessa a essere concettualizzata come scienza dell’ordine sociale, volta a estrarre informazioni dalla società per perfezionare l’«arte» di governarla. La carità organizzata ispirò altresì l’istituzione della Social Science Association nel 1857
The Ideology of Greater Italy: Absolving the Guilt of Empire, Recensione di E. Ertola, Il colonialismo degli italiani: Storia di un’ideologia (Rome: Carocci, 2022)
No full textRecensione al volume di Emanuele Ertola: Il colonialismo degli italian
Guardie, ladri e la giurisprudenza dell’anticipazione, Recensione di S. Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020)
No full textrecensione al libro di S. Nicolazzo, Vagrant Figure
Recensione di A. Fitzmaurice, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021)
No full textRecensione del libro di A. Fitzmaurice, King Leopold's Ghostwrite
Recensione di J. Adelman (ed.), Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019)
No full textreview of the book edited by Jeremy Adelman, Empire and the Social Science
- …
