Imperial Bodies in London

Imperial Bodies in London
Author: Kristin D. Hussey
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2021-10-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822988445

Since the eighteenth century, European administrators and officers, military men, soldiers, missionaries, doctors, wives, and servants moved back and forth between Britain and its growing imperial territories. The introduction of steam-powered vessels, and deep-docks to accommodate them at London ports, significantly reduced travel time for colonists and imperial servants traveling home to see their families, enjoy a period of study leave, or recuperate from the tropical climate. With their minds enervated by the sun, livers disrupted by the heat, and blood teeming with parasites, these patients brought the empire home and, in doing so, transformed medicine in Britain. With Imperial Bodies in London, Kristin D. Hussey offers a postcolonial history of medicine in London. Following mobile tropical bodies, her book challenges the idea of a uniquely domestic medical practice, arguing instead that British medicine was imperial medicine in the late Victorian era. Using the analytic tools of geography, she interrogates sites of encounter across the imperial metropolis to explore how medical research and practice were transformed and remade at the crossroads of empire.

Imperial Bodies

Imperial Bodies
Author: Shana Minkin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503610500

At the turn of the twentieth century, Alexandria, Egypt, was a bustling transimperial port city, under nominal Ottoman and unofficial British imperial rule. Thousands of European subjects lived, worked, and died there. And when they died, the machinery of empire had to negotiate for space, resources, and control with the nascent national state. Imperial Bodies shows how the mechanisms of death became a tool for exerting both imperial and national governance. Shana Minkin investigates how French and British power asserted itself in Egypt through local consular claims of belonging manifested within the mundane caring for dead bodies. European communities corralled imperial bodies through the bureaucracies and rituals of death—from hospitals, funerals, and cemeteries to autopsies and death registrations. As they did so, imperial consulates pushed against the workings of both the Egyptian state and each other, expanding their governments' material and performative power. Ultimately, this book reveals how European imperial powers did not so much claim Alexandria as their own, as they maneuvered, manipulated, and cajoled their empires into Egypt.

Imperial Bodies

Imperial Bodies
Author: E. M. Collingham
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2001-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN:

Through a discussion of texts and practices, the body is introduced into the historical account as an active social principle. Collingham paints a vivid picture of life and manners of the British in India.

In the Service of Empire

In the Service of Empire
Author: Fae Dussart
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2022-01-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350121185

Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. This book sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identities and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper articles, official papers and court records, Dussart explores the strategic nature of the relationship, the connection between imperialism, domesticity and a master/servant paradigm that was deployed in different ways by varied actors often neglected in the historical record. Positioned outside the family but inside the private place of the home, 'the domestic servant' was often the foil against which 19th-century contemporaries worked out class, race and gender identities across metropole and colony, creating those places in the process. The role of domestic servants in empire thus lay not only in the labour they undertook, but also in the way the servant-master relationship constituted ground that helped other power relations to be imagined and contested. Dussart explores the domestic service relationship in 19th-century Britain and India, considering how ideas about servants and their masters and/or mistresses spanned imperial space, and shaped peoples and places within it.

Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Author: K. Boehm
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2016-02-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137283653

This book provides fresh perspectives on the object world, embodied experience and materiality in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Contributors explore canonical works by Austen, Brontë, Dickens and James, alongside less-familiar texts and a range of objects including nineteenth-century automata, scrapbooks, museum exhibits and antiques.

Food Culture in Colonial Asia

Food Culture in Colonial Asia
Author: Cecilia Leong-Salobir
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2011-05-03
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1136726543

Presenting a social history of colonial food practices in India, Malaysia and Singapore, this book discusses the contribution that Asian domestic servants made towards the development of this cuisine between 1858 and 1963. Domestic cookbooks, household management manuals, memoirs, diaries and travelogues are used to investigate the culinary practices in the colonial household, as well as in clubs, hill stations, hotels and restaurants. Challenging accepted ideas about colonial cuisine, the book argues that a distinctive cuisine emerged as a result of negotiation and collaboration between the expatriate British and local people, and included dishes such as curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree, country captain and pish pash. The cuisine evolved over time, with the indigenous servants preparing both local and European foods. The book highlights both the role and representation of domestic servants in the colonies. It is an important contribution for students and scholars of food history and colonial history, as well as Asian Studies.

The British Empire, Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism

The British Empire, Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism
Author: Robert Johnson
Publisher: Humanities-Ebooks
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN:

This brief study of Imperialism offers a concise overview of Britain’s role in Colonialism, the slavery issue, the British Raj and the scramble for Africa, and probes the motives for empire and continuing issues of post-colonialism.

British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770-1940

British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1770-1940
Author: Rosie Dias
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2018-10-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1501332163

Correspondence, travel writing, diary writing, painting, scrapbooking, curating, collecting and house interiors allowed British women scope to express their responses to imperial sites and experiences in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Taking these productions as its archive, British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775-1930 includes a collection of essays from different disciplines that consider the role of British women's cultural practices and productions in conceptualising empire. While such productions have started to receive greater scholarly attention, this volume uses a more self-conscious lens of gender to question whether female cultural work demonstrates that colonial women engaged with the spaces and places of empire in distinctive ways. By working across disciplines, centuries and different colonial geographies, the volume makes an exciting and important contribution to the field by demonstrating the diverse ways in which European women shaped constructions of empire in the modern period.

London is the Place for Me

London is the Place for Me
Author: Kennetta Hammond Perry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2016-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190493437

Black people in the British Empire have long challenged the notion that "there ain't no black in the Union Jack." For the post-World War II wave of Afro-Caribbean migrants, many of whom had long been subjects of the Empire, claims to a British identity and imperial citizenship were considered to be theirs by birthright. However, while Britain was internationally touted as a paragon of fair play and equal justice, they arrived in a nation that was frequently hostile and unwilling to incorporate Black people into its concept of what it meant to be British. Black Britons therefore confronted the racial politics of British citizenship and became active political agents in challenging anti-Black racism. In a society with a highly racially circumscribed sense of identity-and the laws, customs, and institutions to back it up-Black Britons had to organize and fight to assert their right to belong. In London Is The Place for Me, Kennetta Hammond Perry explores how Afro-Caribbean migrants navigated the politics of race and citizenship in Britain and reconfigured the boundaries of what it meant to be both Black and British at a critical juncture in the history of Empire and twentieth century transnational race politics. She situates their experience within a broader context of Black imperial and diasporic political participation, and examines the pushback-both legal and physical-that the migrants' presence provoked. Bringing together a variety of sources including calypso music, photographs, migrant narratives, and records of grassroots Black political organizations, London Is the Place for Me positions Black Britons as part of wider public debates both at home and abroad about citizenship, the meaning of Britishness and the politics of race in the second half of the twentieth century. The United Kingdom's postwar discriminatory curbs on immigration and explosion of racial violence forced White Britons as well as Black to question their perception of Britain as a racially progressive society and, therefore, to question the very foundation of their own identities. Perry's examination expands our understanding of race and the Black experience in Europe and uncovers the critical role that Black people played in the formation of contemporary British society.