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Introduction: Books, boundaries and Britishness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Deana Heath
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
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Summary

Boundaries – spatial, cultural, moral – are the fault lines of empires. Such boundaries – which divided ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, ‘self’ and ‘other’, and ‘home’ and empire' – became sources of growing concern in the late nineteenth century. At a time when nations were first imagined somatically, as gendered and racialized bodies, and individual bodies were conceptualized in political terms, as waging battles against external enemies, the phenomenal expansion of the material and communicative circuits of the European empires that had commenced in mid-century, while serving to consolidate imperial space and usher in a new ‘globalizing’ age, also served to undermine and reconfigure the boundaries of rule through which imperial and colonial regimes operated. Such a process was facilitated by particular commodities, although ones rarely analysed as such, namely printed matter such as books and periodicals, which were purveyed through the trade networks of empires in growing numbers. For in addition to being forms of material capital, such printed matter also functioned as cultural capital that served to mark the ‘distinction’ – and hence worth – of European cultures and norms. It was this latter aspect that made print culture so appealing to colonizing regimes as a means of ‘civilizing’ subjects. Yet employing books and periodicals as cultural–moral capital posed a problem for these regimes, for the acquisition of such capital by colonized subjects served not only to fracture the boundaries demarcating colonizer and colonized, and nation and empire, but ultimately to diminish the value of such commodities – and with it their power to serve not only as colonizing tools, but as a means of ensuring the ‘strength’ and ‘purity’ of European bodies, nations and empires.

Type
Chapter
Information
Purifying Empire
Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia
, pp. 1 - 7
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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