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3443016 results

Page 328 of 172151

Interweaving myths in Shakespeare and his contemporaries
  • Edited by Janice Valls- Russell, Agnès Lafont, Charlotte Coffin
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • This book sets the scene for the reinterpretations and explorations of the ways William Shakespeare and his contemporaries worked mythological material on their looms. In Ovid, each text leaves a trace in the others, introducing an enriching leaven that expands the text. Reading Holinshed's efforts to place Samothes or Brutus on England's family tree, one feels sorry for those chroniclers who had to reconcile a variety of founding tales and defend mutable causes. Founding myths need a renowned ancestor; warlike feats; identification with a territory, continuity, purity of blood; and someone to tell the story: fame must be recorded by pen if it is to survive marble monuments. The book discusses the Trojan matter of King John, which powerfully structures and textures the scenes of the siege of Angiers and, more specifically, the tragic fates of Constance and Arthur. It also considers some metamorphoses of Shakespeare and Ovid. The book reiterates imaginative association, influence, historically diachronic descent study, as evidenced in that kind of critical work that finds in a keyword an attractive pretext for projecting an author's particular interest or, a critic's. Yves Peyré's work opens perspectives on post-Shakespeare reworkings and Shakespearian myths that were also explored during the ESRA conference and inspired a separate collection of essays, Mythologising Shakespeare: A European Perspective.

The challenge of the sublime
  • From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art
  • Hélène Ibata
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.

Servants of the empire
  • The Irish in Punjab, 1881–1921
  • Patrick O’Leary
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • The British empire was actually an amalgam of Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English empires. Punjab, 'the pride of British India', attracted the cream of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), many of the most influential of whom were Irish. Some of these men, along with Irish viceroys, were inspired by their Irish backgrounds to ensure security of tenure for the Punjabi peasant, besides developing vast irrigation schemes which resulted in the province becoming India's most affluent. This book aims to ascertain whether backgrounds of Irish public servants in Punjab, and that of Irish viceroys in dealing with Punjab affairs, engendered attitudes which were so different. The nub of the matter is whether an Irish background influenced public servants in their duties, whether or not they thought themselves primarily as British or Irish. The first part of the book deals with three Indian public services: the ICS, the Indian Medical Service (IMS) and the Indian Public Works Department (PWD). The social, religious, ethnic and educational backgrounds of Irish recruits these services and the reasons behind the remarkable increase in Irish recruitment are then discussed. British and Irish public servants influenced domestic Indian politics, especially in the admission of Indians to the very services dominated by the British. Perhaps the long-term but impermanent commitment of Irish people to the furtherance of British colonial aims merits a more apt designation, one perhaps less pejorative than 'collaborator'. Twentieth-century contemporaries made connections between north-west India and Northern Ireland by dubbing Punjab the 'Ulster of India'.

Evaluating parental power
  • An exercise in pluralist political theory
  • Allyn Fives
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • This is a book about parents, power, and children and, in particular, the legitimacy of parents' power over their children. It takes seriously the challenge posed by moral pluralism, and considers the role of both theoretical rationality and practical judgement in resolving moral dilemmas associated with parental power. The book first examines the prevailing view about parental power: a certain form of paternalism, justified treatment of those who lack the qualities of an agent, and one that does not generate moral conflicts. It proposes an alternative, pluralist view of paternalism before showing that even paternalism properly understood is of limited application when we evaluate parental power. According to the caretaker thesis, parental power makes up for the deficits in children's agency, and for that reason children should be subjected to standard institutional paternalism. The liberation thesis stands at the other end of the spectrum concerning children's rights. The book then addresses the counter-argument that issues of legitimacy arise in the political domain and not in respect of parent-child relations. It also examines the 'right to parent' and whether parents should be licensed, monitored, or trained children's voluntariness and competence, and the right to provide informed consent for medical treatment and research participation. Finally, the book talks about parents' efforts to share a way of life with their children and the State's efforts to shape the values of future citizens through civic education. The overall approach taken has much more in common with the problem-driven political philosophy.

Cultural identities and the aesthetics of Britishness
  • Edited by Dana Arnold
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • The need for a single public culture - the creation of an authentic identity - is fundamental to our understanding of nationalism and nationhood. This book considers how manufactured cultural identities are expressed. It explores how notions of Britishness were constructed and promoted through architecture, landscape, painting, sculpture and literature, and the ways in which the aesthetics of national identities promoted the idea of nation. The idea encompassed the doctrine of popular freedom and liberty from external constraint. Particular attention is paid to the political and social contexts of national identities within the British Isles; the export, adoption and creation of new identities; and the role of gender in the forging of those identities. The book examines the politics of land-ownership as played out within the arena of the oppositional forces of the Irish Catholics and the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy. It reviews the construction of a modern British imperial identity as seen in the 1903 durbar exhibition of Indian art. The area where national projection was particularly directed was in the architecture and the displays of the national pavilions designed for international exhibitions. Discussions include the impact of Robert Bowyer's project on the evolution of history painting through his re-representation of English history; the country houses with architectural styles ranging from Gothic to Greek Revivalist; and the place of Arthurian myth in British culture. The book is an important addition to the field of postcolonial studies as it looks at how British identity creation affected those living in England.

Representing Africa
  • Landscape, exploration and empire in southern Africa, 1780–1870
  • John McAleer
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • Southern Africa played a varied but vital role in Britain's maritime and imperial stories. The region was one of the most intricate pieces in the British imperial strategic jigsaw, and representations of southern African landscape and maritime spaces reflect its multifaceted position. This book examines the ways in which British travellers, explorers and artists viewed southern Africa in a period of evolving and expanding British interest in the region. Cape Town occupied in the visual and cultural understanding of British people in the 1760s. It is a representation of southern Africa. The book presents a study that examines and contextualises such representations of southern African landscapes, seascapes and settlements by British officials, travellers and artists. It interrogates how and why these descriptions and depictions came about, as well as the role they played in the British imagining and understanding of southern African spaces. The focus is on a period of evolving and expanding British interest and intervention in southern Africa, its impact on peoples and their environs, and the expression in contemporary landscape and seascape representation. British formal control at the Cape of Good Hope brought European aesthetic frameworks to bear on the viewing of landscapes. Exploration and imperialism were defining features of the British experience in southern Africa. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, contemporary travelogues and visual images, the book posits landscape as a useful prism through which to view changing British attitudes towards Africa.

Silk and empire
  • Brenda M. King
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • The collections of Indian silks made in the nineteenth century reveal the overwhelming evidence for the positive and unbroken appreciation of India's silk textiles over centuries by industrialists, educators, designers, theorists, museum curators and consumers. This book challenges the notion that Britain always exploited its empire. Silk was a labour intensive, luxury commodity that provided livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of workers in Indian and England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship were all part of the Anglo-Indian silk trade and were nurtured in the era of empire through mutually beneficial collaboration. Many silk manufacturers and design theorists who were consistent in their thinking and who wanted to make beautiful things in an ethical manner followed the ethics of the Arts and Crafts Movement. In 1836 the Central School of Art and Design was founded, followed by a branch in Spitalfields, then the centre of English silk production. The strong links between Indian designs, the English silk industry and prominent members of the English the arts and crafts movement led to the production of beautiful and luxurious textiles. The trade operated within and without the empire, according to its own dictates and prospered in the face of increasing competition from China and Japan. The book demonstrates that Indian silks were admired by English textile manufacturers both for their technical and aesthetic attributes, and for their ability to help undermine French supremacy in European silk production.

Debating Tudor policy in sixteenth-century Ireland
  • ‘Reform’ treatises and political discourse
  • David Heffernan
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • During the sixteenth-century officials and interested parties in Ireland composed hundreds of papers on crown policy in the country and sent them to the metropolitan government in England. The information contained in these ‘reform’ treatises substantially shaped how senior ministers in England viewed an Ireland which very few of them had visited personally. Moreover these documents informed much of these ministers’ outlooks on the Irish of Ireland and the allegedly backward political and social system operating there. Perhaps most importantly, these treatises argued for the adoption of specific policies to confront various problems perceived in Ireland. Some of these in arguing for ‘reform’ through an aggressive programme of regional conquest and colonization were highly coercive, while others in proposing that ‘reform’ could be achieved through educational and social reform or the expansion of the court system had a more sanguine view of Ireland. Whatever the approach, a great many of these were in due course implemented in Ireland. In time the decision to implement these same policies played a major role in shaping the history of early modern Ireland and indeed the wider British state. As such these treatises are central to how the Tudors governed Ireland. This book offers the first extended treatment of the approximately six-hundred extant ‘reform’ treatises. In doing so it examines not just the content of this large body of papers, but how officials and other parties on the periphery of the Irish government debated policy in sixteenth-century Ireland and what impact their writings had.

Ordering Africa
  • Anthropology, European imperialism, and the politics of knowledge
  • Edited by Helen Tilley, Robert J. Gordon
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • Many questions present themselves when considering the historical relationship between anthropology and empire following the Scramble for Africa. These include the extent of imperial fortunes in Africa, rising and falling with officials' knowledge of the people under their jurisdiction. This book looks at the institutional frameworks of anthropology, and shows that the colonial project to order Africa, intellectually and politically, was a messy and not-so comprehensive endeavor. It first considers the roles of metropolitan researchers and institutes such as the colonial ethnographers active in French West Africa, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Berlin, and the British-based International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. The book deals with the role of African ethnograpghers for their study on African teaching assistants and schoolmasters-cum-ethnographers, and the study of Jomo Kenyatta's journey to produce Facing Mount Kenya. Swiss missionaries undertook discovery and domestication first on European soil before it was transferred to African soils and societies. Primordial imagination at work in equatorial Africa is discussed through an analysis of Fang ethnographies, and the infertility scares among Mongo in the Belgian Congo is contrasted with the Nzakara in the French Congo. Once colonial rule had been imposed, administrators and imperial managers were often forced to consider those judicial and social rules that had governed Africans' lives and had predated colonialism. Studies of Italian Northeast Africa, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and French West Africa reveal the uneven ways in which ethnographic knowledge was pursued and applied in this respect.

Sex and Sports
  • Transgender Rights and the Culture War Over Girls' Sports
  • Kimberly A. Yuracko
  • Published online:
    28 March 2026
    Print publication:
    09 April 2026
  • This book addresses one of the most controversial and polarizing topics of recent years: transgender girls' inclusion in girls' sports. The book explores legal precedent and medical science and explains why neither can answer the question of how eligibility rules should be drawn for girls' sports. The decision is, at core, a political one necessarily reflecting social values and priorities. The book examines positions from the right and left that have dominated the public debate revealing their ideological commitments and logical weak points. With the goal of helping readers clarify their own positions, rather than advocacy, the book provides a framework for thinking about this issue that focuses on the discrete benefits organized sports provides to participants and society more broadly and considers how such benefits can be most fairly and justly allocated to girls and boys – both transgender and cisgender.

Borders and conflict in South Asia
  • The Radcliffe boundary commission and the partition of Punjab
  • Lucy P. Chester
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • This book is the first full-length study of the 1947 drawing of the Indo-Pakistani boundary in Punjab. It uses the Radcliffe commission, headed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe , as a window onto the decolonisation and independence of India and Pakistan. Examining the competing interests that influenced the actions of the various major players, the book highlights British efforts to maintain a grip on India even as the decolonisation process spun out of control. It examines the nature of power relationships within the colonial state, with a focus on the often-veiled exertion of British colonial power. With conflict between Hindus , Muslims and Sikhs reaching unprecedented levels in the mid-1940s , British leaders felt compelled to move towards decolonization. The partition was to be perceived as a South Asian undertaking, with British officials acting only as steady and impartial guides. Radcliffe's use of administrative boundaries reinforced the impact of imperial rule. The boundaries that Radcliffe defined turned out to be restless divisions, and in both the 1965 and 1971 wars India and Pakistan battled over their Punjabi border. After the final boundary, known as the 'Radcliffe award', was announced, all sides complained that Radcliffe had not taken the right 'other factors' into account. Radcliffe's loyalty to British interests is key to understanding his work in 1947. Drawing on extensive archival research in India, Pakistan and Britain, combined with innovative use of cartographic sources, the book paints a vivid picture of both the partition process and the Radcliffe line's impact on Punjab.

The Germans in India
  • Elite European migrants in the British Empire
  • Panikos Panayi
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • While most of the Germans who suffered expulsion during the First World War lived within British shores, the Royal Navy brought Germans from throughout the world to face incarceration in the their network of camp. This book offers a new interpretation of global migration from the early nineteenth until the early twentieth century. It examines the elite German migrants who progressed to India, especially missionaries, scholars and scientists, businessmen and travellers. The book investigates the reasons for the migration of Germans to India. An examination of the realities of German existence in India follows. It then examines the complex identities of the Germans in India in the century before the First World War. The role of the role of racism, orientalism and Christianity is discussed. The stereotypes that emerged from travelogues include: an admiration of Indian landscapes; contempt for Hinduism; criticism of the plight of women; and repulsion at cityscapes. The book moves to focus upon the transformation which took place as a result of this conflict, mirroring the plight of Germans in other parts of the world. The marginalisation which took place in 1920 closely mirrored the plight of the German communities throughout the British Empire. The unique aspect of the experience in India consisted of the birth of a national identity. Finally, the book places the experience of the Germans in India into four contexts: the global history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; German history; history of the British Empire in India; and Indian history.

Cultures of governance and peace
  • A comparison of EU and Indian theoretical and policy approaches
  • Edited by J. Peter Burgess, Oliver P. Richmond, Ranabir Samaddar
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • This volume seeks to bring together insights which look at the intersection of governance, culture and conflict resolution in India and the EU, two very different but connected epistemic, cultural and institutional settings, which have been divided by distance, colonialism, and culture, and yet recently brought closer together by ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, neoliberal state, and development projects. The differences are obvious in terms of geography, culture, the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. The depth of cultural variation and scale as well as very significant institutional differences are obvious. What emerges from this research project, and what is more unexpected is similarity in their critiques of neoliberalism, of governance and its conceptual relationship with governmentality, their focus on decentralised institutions, and local forms of peace agency, the escalatory tendencies of borders, and the urgency of development and self-determination pressures.The volume based on strong case studies and rigorous analysis examines these issues in the context of the practices of conflict resolution in India and Europe.

Exporting empire
  • Africa, colonial officials and the construction of the British Imperial State, c. 1900–1939
  • Christopher Prior
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • This book is a study of the colonial officials who governed British Africa between 1900 and the Second World War. Historians have to date failed to provide a detailed examination of what caused these ‘men on the spot’ to think and act in the ways they did. Drawing on a vast range of hitherto underexplored private papers, this book assesses the scope of their different attitudes and endeavours. It considers the role of background, education, training, British culture, social and intellectual networks across Africa, and personal self-interest in shaping the ways that officials related to Africans and to one another, and their ideas of race, empire, governance, development, and duty. It considers the implications of these officials’ mental landscapes for some of the key theories of empire to have emerged in recent years.

Imperial persuaders
  • Images of Africa and Asia in British advertising
  • Anandi Ramamurthy
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • We live in an age in which advertising is part of the fabric of our lives. Advertising in its modern form largely has its origins in the later nineteenth century. This book is the first to provide a historical survey of images of black people in advertising during the colonial period. It highlights the way in which racist representations continually developed and shifted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, depending on the particular political and economic interests of the producers of these images. The book analyses the various conflicting, and changing ideologies of colonialism and racism in British advertising, revealing reveal the purposes to which these images of dehumanisation and exploitation were employed. The first part deals with images of Africa, the second deals with images of black people in the West, and the third considers questions relating to issues about images and social representations in general. The Eurocentric image of the 'savage' and 'heathen', the period of slavery, European exploration and missionary activity, as well as the colonisation of Africa in the nineteenth century are explored. Representations of the servant, the entertainer, and the exotic man or woman with a rampant sexuality are also presented. The key strategy with which images of black people from the colonial period have been considered is that of stereotyping. The material interests of soap manufacturers, cocoa manufacturers, tea advertising, and tobacco advertising are discussed. The book explains the four particular types of imagery dominate corporate advertising during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Conquering nature in Spain and its empire, 1750–1850
  • Helen Cowie
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • As the British and French empires expanded, constructing new imperial dimensions through growing commerce and the relationships of industrialisation, the bases of Spanish power were being undermined. Nationalism, revolt, the pursuit of forms of decolonisation (often aided by Spain's rivals) became the prime characteristic of Central and South American politics. This book examines the study of natural history in the Spanish empire in the years 1750-1850, explaining how the Spanish authorities collected specimens for the Real Jardín Botanico and the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural. During this period, Spain made strenuous efforts to survey, inventory and exploit the natural productions of her overseas possessions, orchestrating a series of scientific expeditions and cultivating and displaying American fauna and flora in metropolitan gardens and museums. This book assesses the cultural significance of natural history, emphasising the figurative and utilitarian value with which eighteenth-century Spaniards invested natural objects, from globetrotting elephants to three-legged chickens. Attention is also paid to the ambiguous position of Creole (American-born Spanish) naturalists, who were simultaneously anxious to secure European recognition for their work, to celebrate the natural wealth of their homelands. It considers the role of precision instruments, physical suffering and moral probity in the construction of the naturalist's professional identity. The book assesses how indigenous people, women and Creoles measured up to these demanding criteria. Finally, it discusses how the creation, legitimisation and dissemination of scientific knowledge reflected broader questions of imperial power and national identity.

Ending British rule in Africa
  • Writers in a common cause
  • Carol Polsgrove
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • Across the continent of Africa, a web of laws silenced African speech. On the eve of World War II, a small, impoverished group of Africans and West Indians in London dared to imagine the end of British rule in Africa. Printing gave oppositions a voice, initially through broadsheets, tracts, pamphlets, later through books and articles. The group launched an anti-colonial campaign that used publishing as a pathway to liberation. These writers included West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Ras Makonnen, Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leone's I. T. A. Wallace Johnson. They formed a part of International African Service Bureau (IASB), and the communists saw them as "generals without an army, they have no base and must depend on their pens". Padmore saw 'trusteeship' as a concept invoked as far back as the late nineteenth-century conferences that divided up Africa. Pan-Africa, a monthly periodical T. Ras Makonnen put out, reported that Richard Wright urged his listeners to form an international network of 'cultured progressives'. Labour-powered nationalism was to Padmore more than a drive for self-government. With the Gold Coast political ground so unsettled, neither Nkrumah nor the Convention People's Party (CPP) made Wright privy to their operations. Inspired by the movement for self-government in British West African colonies, French radicals like Leopold Senghor were rebelling against French political control. In 1969, when a small American publisher reissued A History of Pan-African Revolt , James added to it an epilogue explaining the 'rapid decline of African nationalism'.

Exhibiting the empire
  • Cultures of display and the British empire
  • Edited by John McAleer, John M. MacKenzie
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • Britain's overseas empire had a profound impact on people in the United Kingdom, their domestic spaces and rituals, and their perceptions of, and attitudes towards, the wider world. This book considers how a whole range of cultural products - from paintings to architecture - were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. The churches and missionary societies were important in transmitting visual propaganda for their work, through their magazines, through lectures and magic lantern slides, through exhibitions and publications such as postcards. The book offers an overview of the main context in which four continents iconography was deployed after 1800: the country houses of the British elite. Publication, and subsequent distribution and consumption, offered a forum for exploration endeavours to enter public consciousness. James Cook's expeditions were particularly important in bringing exploration to a wider public audience, and the published accounts derived from them offer strong evidence of the interest in exploration at all levels of society. The exhibition of empire, typically associated with ambition, pride and expertise, also included an unruly genre: the satirical peace print. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars resulted in the eclipse of the French, Spanish and Holy Roman Empires, and Britain's emergence as a 'global, naval, commercial, and imperial superpower'. Numerous scholars in recent years have noted the centrality of the Indian exhibits in the Crystal Palace and emphasised the exhibition's role in promoting commodities from Britain's colonies.

Chocolate, women and empire
  • A social and cultural history
  • Emma Robertson
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • Chocolate remains a mythic product, a symbol both of luxury and of a fantasy world of exoticism, yet also (for many) a workaday requirement providing energy and nutrition. This book concentrates on three key stages of chocolate production in the British empire: growing cocoa beans, manufacturing chocolate from these beans, and the marketing of chocolate products. It begins with the romantic construction of chocolate, redresses the gender imbalance of many existing Rowntree histories and values women's own interpretations of their working lives. The analysis of advertising establishes connections and tensions between the worlds of production and consumption, with an attention to gender and class, and to cultural characteristics. The book tackles imperial histories of chocolate and how British firms, including Rowntree, constructed their own romantic narratives of the 'discovery' and development of chocolate production. It focuses on Nigerian women farmers who have always been active agents in cocoa production, despite having to struggle against the often intersecting structures and ideologies of colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy. The book explores the ways in which Rowntree created and reflected particular understandings of the historic city of York and of empire, through media such as their in-house journal, 'Cocoa Works Magazine'. It provides the oral histories of women factory workers, including that of a Chinese girl, and their experiences of gendered and raced labour in chocolate manufacture.

European empires and the people
  • Popular responses to imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy
  • Edited by John M. MacKenzie
  • Published by:
    Manchester University Press
    Published online:
    28 March 2026
  • The European scramble for colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was driven by rather more than the interests of an elite, aristocratic and bourgeois. This book is about the 'colonisation of consciousness'. It surveys in comparative form the transmission of imperial ideas to the public in six European countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book offers six case studies on France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy, providing parallel studies of the manner in which colonial ambitions and events in the respective European empires were given wider popular visibility. The book demonstrates the inter-war years that saw the stepping up of imperial propaganda throughout the surviving imperial powers. Inspired by the directions of research pioneered by John MacKenzie, specialists of the French Empire started to combine methodologies from social and cultural history to revise the perception of French popular imperialism. Germany's imperialism is analysed along the axes of mobility and migration, 'race' and the sciences, commodities and markets, the missions and imperialist social formations, and the vast field of popular culture. What sets popular imperialism in Belgium apart from others is the remarkable yet ironic reverence reserved for Leopold II. Power rivalries, ingenious if tricky diplomacy, and Leopold's tenacity resulted in recognition of his rule over much of the Congo around the time of the Berlin conference. So far as the peoples of Europe were concerned, the imperial experience helped, paradoxically, to further 'Eurocentrism' and install the naturalisation of Europeanness as 'whiteness'.

Page 328 of 172151