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  3. Evaluating Empire and Confronting Colonialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain
  • Cited by 24
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139343831
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139343831
Subjects:
British History after 1450, History
Information

Book description

This volume comprehensively examines how metropolitan Britons spoke and wrote about the British Empire during the short eighteenth century, from about 1730 to 1790. The work argues that following several decades of largely uncritical celebration of the empire as a vibrant commercial entity that had made Britain prosperous and powerful, a growing familiarity with the character of overseas territories and their inhabitants during and after the Seven Years' War produced a substantial critique of empire. This critique evolved out of a widespread revulsion against the behaviours exhibited by Britons overseas and built on a language of 'otherness' that metropolitans had used since the beginning of overseas expansion to describe its participants, the societies and polities that Britons abroad constructed in their new habitats. It used the languages of humanity and justice as standards to evaluate and condemn the behaviours of both overseas Britons and subaltern people in the British Empire, whether in India, the Americas, Africa or Ireland.

Reviews

'Groundbreaking … One cannot imagine anyone failing to profit from immersing themselves in (these) elegantly written pages.(Greene) has opened up a subject and a debate on anti-colonialism in the British Empire which is likely to be with us for a long time to come.'

Source: History Today

'Greene offers a series of case studies of imperial issues in America, Africa, the Caribbean, Ireland, and India between the 1760s and 1790s … It provides an important context with which to understand early America …'

Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy Source: Journal of American History

'An important book on a topic to which historians have not given due attention. Greene has done nothing short of opening up a new subfield of eighteenth-century imperial history. No doubt rich harvests will follow.'

Max M. Edling Source: The Journal of Southern History

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