cultural construction of the British world

The volume builds upon developments in recent years in reconceptualising the British Empire as a system structured around complex, multi-layered networks, which transcended conventionally defined boundaries between metropolitan and colonial space. This book brings together original research by eleven distinguished historians who explore the cultural factors that helped to build and sustain a British world-system between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking an expansive view of culture, the book considers such ranging topics as images of nakedness, transnational networks, literary criticism, travel narratives, humanitarianism, legal cultures, anti-slavery, visions of capitalism, and household possessions. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate that the British world’s flourishing depended upon far more than such material factors as military power, demographics and economics. Central to this argument is a focus on the diverse roles that colonised peoples and colonial societies played in the fashioning of a cultural British world. The book investigates a wide geographical range, including both the formal Empire and areas of British informal influence, with chapters on India, Canton, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Sierra Leone, the Ottoman Empire and the West Indies. In doing so, it argues for a cultural British world transcending the settler colonies that have been the focus of much recent scholarship. Significantly, the book places such activity within a wider imperial framework, emphasising the interaction between contemporaneous empires in a way that repositions the history of the British world in a broader global context. The cultural construction of the British world will be crucial reading for scholars of the British Empire, globalisation and transnationalism. 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. Eleven original essays explore a wide range of topics, including images of nakedness, humanitarianism, anti-slavery, literary criticism, travel narratives, 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. The cultural construction of the British world 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.